


On A Provisional Basis

by Chex (provetheworst)



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Badass SHIELD Agents, Clint Barton Needs a Hug, Complete, M/M, Madripoor, Mission Fic, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, SHIELD Agent Bucky Barnes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-26
Updated: 2015-04-07
Packaged: 2018-03-19 16:46:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 32,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3617046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/provetheworst/pseuds/Chex
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If SHIELD were in better shape, Clint wouldn't have ended up with his own team and someone else would have ended up dealing with the new recruit. Then again, he wouldn't have had a good excuse to get the skycycle back, either, so it all evens out. </p><p>Wherein Hydra are tenacious, no one can confirm or deny the existence of psychics, and Clint's willingness to put his faith in folks who no one quite trusts - along with his thing for incredibly competent assassins - lands him in trouble. Again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [shanology](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shanology/gifts).



> I got inspired by a post made by Tumblr user shanology way, way back in December. Three months later, and here we are, apparently! The [post itself is here](http://shanology.tumblr.com/post/106469233580/clint-having-sex-with-bucky-in-their-hotel-after) and you can click that link if you want some spoilers regarding how this thing's gonna go, I guess. I took some liberties, but that's the gist of the plot.
> 
> Thanks to Tumblr user wartimebucky for endless encouragement and help editing and whatever else it is she does. I will update this regularly, never fear.

"Agent Barton," Maria says, nodding. "Please, sit."

Clint turns the chair around backwards, folding his arms over the back rest. "Hey, Maria."

"That's Commander Hill," she says, unphased. "Now, Barton. You're going to be leading a team into Madripoor. There's a Hydra base there, and we need you to gather as much information about their activities in the area as possible before destroying the operation. You have a week."

"Who've I got?"

"Romanoff, Preston, May, and a new recruit. He's going along on a provisional basis."

“Yippee.”

"I'm briefing you about this separately." She looks somewhat pained as she rubs at the bridge of her forehead. "I'm not sure he's field-ready yet, but he insists, and, well. Now's as good a time as any to test his loyalty."

"A new recruit and we’re testing his loyalty, too?" Clint snorts. "You're sending this kid to Madripoor with me and you're not even sure he's loyal? What if he's Hydra or something?"

"Then you and your team handle the situation however you see fit, and he was never part of the operation," she says. "If he goes rogue, you take him out and say you encountered him there."

Clint sits up a little straighter, frowning. "So who is this, exactly?"

"This is restricted information, for you and your team only," Maria tells him. She's so serious that Clint doesn't joke about SHIELD's inability to keep secrets these days. He knows he, at least, can keep his mouth shut. So can Romanoff, and May. Preston probably will. Clint doesn't know her that well, but if Maria trusts her, so does he. Mostly. "You are not to tell any other members of the Avengers Initiative. Any of them."

"Okay," Clint says slowly. "I swear on my job I won't tell."

Maria sighs heavily, and reaches for a remote sitting on the table. With a press of a button, the overhead projector turns on, and -

"Oh," Clint says, eyes wide. "And we're keeping him secret why, exactly?"

"Because he requested it as part of his conditions for working with us." Maria does something like a smile. The expression is intimidating, whatever it is. "I get the feeling he thinks it's more a case of us working for him than the other way around, but ..."

"But we're not turning him down. Nope, okay. Got it."

"Now," Maria says. "Let's get back to the details of the mission. Preston will be handling logistics, but otherwise strategy is up to you. Here’s a map of the area."

-

Clint gets his own jet. It’s big and shiny and black, and the exterior is completely free of SHIELD insignia. SHIELD's logo does appear in the cockpit and all over the interior, though. Clint hopes no bad guys get a good look inside.

Hands on his hips, he stares up at it. The back’s open so they can board if they want - Clint doesn’t have a cool car to drive in, but he might see about renting or buying a cheap motorbike in Madripoor. “Tasha, I get my own jet.”

“Uh-huh,” she says. “For one mission.”

“It’s really not your jet,” Agent Preston says. “Really, really not your jet.”

“It’s mine for now.”

“No,” Preston says.

“Nat -”

Natasha folds her arms and shakes her head, and Clint sighs heavily. Agent May isn’t there to back him up - she’s already on board doing a pre-flight check of the instrument panels. He’s a little too scared to ask their new recruit, so Clint gives up. The jet’s his in his heart, even if he can’t call it that.

“When we get to Madripoor, can I ride my bike in while we’re taking off?” Clint asks.

“Is this what he’s always like?” Agent Preston asks.

“It might actually be worse than usual,” Natasha says. “I think power’s going to his head.”

“That’s a great sign in a leader,” their new recruit says. Clint has no idea where the fuck he snuck up from, but he doesn’t let his surprise show. He’s better trained than that. That doesn’t mean he’s any less freaked out.

“Okay, okay, no riding the bike into the jet during a daring escape. Got it.” Clint holds his hands up palms-out to show they’re empty. He resists the urge to step back. “I promise.”

Preston holds a hand to her ear listening to something on a Bluetooth headset. “Okay, thanks. Looks like the plane’s ready for takeoff.”

“So we should probably get on it,” Clint says. “Everybody ready?”

-

Agent Melinda May is one of Clint’s personal heroes. He doesn’t tell her this. He does trip over his own feet going up to the cockpit to see how she and Preston are getting along. Fine, as it turns out.

“I don’t know if Commander Hill remembered to mention it, but I’m only with your team for this mission. Then I have to get back to the US.”

“Oh,” Clint says. “Yeah, no, she didn’t say, but okay. That’s cool. That’s good. You’re great, we’ll do fine.”

May looks skeptical.

Clint does not say this is his first command. He doesn’t say he’s sort of terrified they’re all going to get killed by the new recruit. Instead, he says, “You’re really cool.”

“Barton?” Preston says. “Get out of here and let us fly this thing.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Clint says, and scurries away. As the door closes, he can hear both of them laughing.

He slumps down on one of the sofas in the main cabin. The interior decorating is fancy enough that he wishes he could text a picture of it to Tony Stark just to show off, but nobody’s supposed to know where they're going at the moment. Nobody else he knows would appreciate how cool this jet is. Steve'd probably get frustrated at the waste of financial resources and time involved in redecorating an outdated jet.

The new recruit sits down on the sofa opposite him, and rests his elbows on his knees, leaning forward.

“Whoa, hey, hi. We should’ve been introduced better. Clint Barton. Call me whatever.”

He gets a lazy salute in reply. “Barton works?”

“Barton works. I’m guessing I shouldn’t call you Bucky?” Clint makes a face, almost apologetic.

A shrug. “Doesn’t matter.”

“Agent Barnes it is.”

“That works.” He does another lazy one-shouldered shrug. “Don’t know if I get the Agent title, though. I’m not really officially working for you guys. Barnes, Bucky. Whatever’s easier.”

“It’s not weird?”

“Not unless you make it weird,” Bucky says.

“Okay, so I’m just gonna … you want a drink?” Clint pushes himself to his feet. The plane has its own bar, which might just be his favorite thing, even if he sort of suspects it’ll be like taking shit from a hotel refrigerator - convenient, but coming right out of his bank account later. There’s not a lot of options in midair, though.

“They got a liquor cabinet on the plane?” Bucky asks.

Clint beams at the selection, hands hovering in front of him in indecision before settling on whiskey. Partly he just wants to look cool. He pours himself a glass. “Apparently this is what I was missing out on working solo all these years.”

“You think you were missing out working solo? Try working brainwashed.”

“I’ll take a pass,” Clint says. His three days under Loki’s control don’t seem like much in comparison. As bad as it was, and as many good people as he killed - it’s not the same. He holds up an empty cup. “What do you want?”

“Whatever’s good. Don’t remember what I liked.”

“Gotcha,” Clint says. That’s the other thing: for all that he spent three days jerked around like a puppet, somewhere in there he knew who he was. From what he’s read of the Winter Soldier files, that wasn’t the case for Bucky.

Natasha disappeared somewhere to sleep shortly after they got on the plane, but she wanders out maybe ten minutes later. Somehow a casual chat turns into the fiercest arm wrestling competition Clint’s ever been involved in his whole life.

He feels like he should be doing something more leader-y then getting his ass kicked by a hundred year old brainwashed assassin, but he mentally writes it off as team bonding and considers it a successful first day.

He’s never had a team of his own before. Worked in groups, sure, but he’s better alone and at a distance. Maria trusts him with it, though, and thus, by proxy, so does Coulson. Unless she didn’t tell him, but SHIELD’s been working on communication and transparency a little more these days. Hopefully he knows and approves.

If two of SHIELD’s highest ranking officials trust him with this - well, they’re goddamn idiots, but their confidence does feel nice.

-

Day one in Madripoor consists of following Preston around as she secures a hotel for them, because - “You didn’t really think we were staying on the plane, did you?”

“I never run missions like this anymore,” Clint says. “I get dropped off and I get out on my own. I thought I had a plane!”

“So we’d just go back to the airport every night…?” May asks.

Clint shrugs.

“I haven’t stayed in a hotel in ages,” Bucky says. “It’ll be nice.”

“I guess,” Clint says. “Yeah, it’s better than just not sleeping until you find a way home.”

“See? You’re catching on.” Bucky punches Clint in the shoulder, then walks off toward a noodle stand by the side of the road.

“I’m not sure if I should be scared of that guy or not,” Clint says.

“You said the same thing about me once,” Natasha points out.

Clint considers that. “And I’m still scared of you. Not sure how that helps.”

“I wasn’t trying to help.”

They waste maybe three hours getting food and sorting out hotel arrangements. Clint complains loudly when the women get a big old suite and him and Bucky are stuck in a shitty room with two tiny beds. Bucky’s blase about their room, though, seeming pleased as punch just to have a bed. Clint doesn’t press the issue, even if he is the team leader and thinks he deserves a little more respect.

The mission’s already getting away from him.

He gets himself lunch, sits down in the hotel room, and goes over logistics. He’s got a big map of the city, and a SHIELD-issued tablet with a secure connection to look up information.

What they know is that Hydra’s got a solid foothold on the island, and has for years. Part of the money comes from selling research chemicals overseas, because the drugs are new and obscure enough that no one’s gotten around to outlawing them yet. What they’re selling is probably only tangential to their actual goals, though.

So. Clint’s team will figure out what Hydra’s up to, try to gather information on other Hydra facilities in the region, then eliminate as many targets as possible. After that, they’re to return to the States, unless he finds compelling evidence for why they should stay in the region.

May’s only with them for the week, so Clint’s hoping they don’t have to stick longer than that. He has faith in his and Natasha’s ability to handle anything thrown their way, but Maria assigned a full team for a reason, probably.

Unless she was fucking with him, which is possible but unlikely.

Bucky turns up again while Clint’s still planning, a plastic bag in hand. “Here.”

“What’s this?”

“Noodles,” Bucky says. “The noodle guy was really nice. Gave me a discount when I said I was getting this for a coworker who was working late.”

“Huh.”

“Natasha says you’re not so great at eating real food. Something about protein bars?”

Clint tries to be subtle about reaching for the protein bar wrapper left on the table and hiding it, but Bucky spots the movement and raises an eyebrow at him.

“Yeah, no. You’re in Madripoor, you’re gonna eat local,” Bucky says.

“Who even are you?”

Bucky takes a moment to answer. “Is that a trick question?”

Clint looks up, trying his best not to look too horrified once he realizes what he just asked. He might succeed; it’s hard to tell since Bucky won’t look at him. “Aw, hey -”

“I’m figuring it out,” Bucky says.

Clint taps a hand against the table until Bucky looks at it, then he gestures toward the other chair. “C’mere, sit down and look at this map with me.”

-

Clint’s still not used to delegating, but he sends May to confirm the location of the Hydra base. Natasha gets sent out to scout the area for intel. Preston gets to stay at the hotel to monitor communications.

“And where are you going?” Agent Preston asks him.

“No idea.” Clint rubs at his face. “Don’t tell anyone, but this is my first time leading a team.”

“Commander Hill might have mentioned that to me.”

“I’m really good once stuff starts exploding,” Clint says. “And setting things up so they’re ready to explode. I’m great at that. Shooting. Arrows. Explosions.”

“You’re doing fine,” she says. “I swear.”

“You’re a nice lady.”

“I’m a SHIELD agent.”

“Okay, sorry,” Clint says. “You’re a very competent agent.”

“I’m married.”

“That’s not - aw, man.” Clint paces maybe six steps away. “I’m gonna go gather intel. Should I gather intel? That’s what I’m doing. I’m the leader, so I can do that.”

“Uh-huh,” she says. “You know, you’re not the worst person I’ve ever had to work with?”

“That’s comforting,” Clint says. “Call me if anything exciting happens.”

He’s almost to the door when she speaks up again. “What are you going to have Barnes doing?”

Clint stops in his tracks. “Oh, shit.”

“Remember to keep an eye out for him,” she says. “We still don’t know if he’s actually loyal.”

“Yeah.” Clint rubs at his forehead and turns back around to look at her, leaning against the wall by the door. “I know what it’s like, being - forced to do things. Having someone mess around inside your head. I want to give him the benefit of the doubt, but it’s weird, right? They had him for that long, and …”

“Yeah,” she says. “I know.”

“Tasha - Agent Romanoff - she turned out fine.”

“Lightning … well, wait, does lightning strike twice? Someone was telling me it actually does strike the same place. But you know what I mean.”

Clint laughs. “Yeah. No guarantee it’ll happen again. Right.”

“So just - keep an eye on him.”

“I know, I know.” Clint shakes his head. “Sorry I’m not too good at this.”

“You’ll come around.” She shrugs, casual as can be. Clint can see why she was put on the team. Patience like that is a gift he sorely needs and barely deserves. “Or you won’t. Long as you don’t get any of us killed, I’m fine with it either way.”

-

The first night, May proves Hydra is in the area, and that they’ve set up shop in a big factory down near the waterfront. Natasha manages to discover that they also have an office downtown, not too far from the hotel.

All Clint learns is that Bucky’s got impressive alcohol tolerance. He also learns that there are a number of folks working in Hydra’s factory who don’t know anything about it and just need the money, which is upsetting but unsurprising.

Day two, Clint wakes up with a hangover and the rest of his team already off doing their own thing. He heads out alone and is eternally grateful for how many expats live here, not to mention the fact that near everyone else speaks English anyway. There’s probably something bad to be said about that - Madripoor’s been so riddled with international criminal interests for so long that it’s made English a necessity - but for now Clint is glad.

He gets an old man to make him a hangover cure that’s hideously noxious, and from there gets advice on where an interested party might look for a well-paying job if morals aren’t an issue. One of Clint’s least favorite things about himself is how good he is at looking both pitiable and marginally competent, but as long as it comes in handy he’s not going to try and change. Not that he’d try and change anyway, probably.

So it is that Clint finds himself down at the loading docks of Hydra’s factory, helping move boxes.

“What’s in these, anyway?” Clint tries asking the guy on the other side of the massive crate he’s carrying.

“I don’t know and I don’t care.” The other guy shifts the crate a little. “They’re not paying us to know. You’re new here, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Don’t ask questions. You’ll be okay. Do the work and go home to - your family, your hotel, apartment, prostitutes, whatever. Whatever you’re doing here. Do the work and go home.”

It takes a moment for Clint to remember to say, “Thanks. I’ll keep that in mind. Thank you.”

He works hauling boxes back and forth for six hours, learns literally nothing of value to the mission - besides the location of a strip club, which is important information for Clint but maybe not anyone else - then goes to find dinner.

“Agent Barton?” a voice in his ear says, and he near jumps out of his skin before realizing it’s just Agent Preston calling.

“Yup.”

“Agent May found some valuable intel. If you could return to base, that’d be great.”

Clint finishes walking up the block he was on, turns right, and circles back around, backtracking almost a quarter mile just to get headed in the right direction again. It only takes twenty minutes or so to walk to the hotel - he refuses to catch a taxi or bus on principle - and by the time he does, everyone’s waiting.

“Agent Barton.” May nods to him, and Clint’s heart might go a little aflutter at being acknowledged, only he’s the team leader, and he’s being professional this time. He reminds himself that he’s not going to hit on or fall into bed with any of the women on his team, just this once, not when he’s technically their superior officer or whatever. He’s not sure precisely how that works in SHIELD - if he’d get punished for fraternization or have some other charges brought against him - but he doesn’t want to find out. “Welcome back.”

“Hey.” Clint waves to his team. Natasha rolls her eyes; Agent Preston waves back. Bucky nods, watching him intently. “So I got close to infiltrating the factory today. Lots of pictures of their cargo, and I’ve got the registration of all the ships they were loading onto right up here.” He taps the side of his head. The pictures aren’t in his head, they’re on his phone, but he hopes everyone else will figure it out. “Should we - okay, wait, Agent Preston. I want you to relay that information to SHIELD. Once I write it out or whatever.”

They’re still waiting on him to say something after that. Clint hesitates. “Okay, uh. Let’s just - go around the table? Agent May, Preston says you found out something good. Lay it on us.”

May holds up a small cardboard box. “I managed to secure some of what they’re selling.”

“Oh, nice,” Clint says. “Wow. Nice. We can send that someplace for testing, right? We should send that someplace for testing.”

“I’ll handle it,” Agent Preston says, and Clint gives her a high five because it seems appropriate. He holds a hand out for Agent May, too, but she just stares at him, and eventually he lets his hand sink down and coughs, trying to pretend that the only reason he had his arm up was to cover his mouth.

“So we’ve got their drugs, still don’t know what they’re doing. But that’s good. Proof it’s them, right? Okay. Anybody else got anything? Agent Romanoff.” Using her last name feels weird, but Clint’s trying to be professional.

“I met a factory shift manager at a bar not far from the facility,” she says, and holds up a credit card-sized rectangle of plastic. “I’ve got a key to get in through any of the staff entrances. The entry would be logged under his name, but if we still need a way in …”

“We still need a way in,” Clint says, giving her the thumbs up. “Or I guess we don’t. But we did. Now we don’t. And, uh. Barnes? You get anything?”

Barnes shrugs. “Access codes. Might be out of date. Should be able to get in and shut down the cameras if you get me to a computer terminal.”

“Oh, that’s awesome. Okay. Great. So you can get us into their computers.”

“Sure.”

“They won’t have changed the codes?” Natasha asks, leaning forward, elbows on the table and her chin in her hands.

“Hydra’s been in enough disarray lately that they’ve worked so far.”

“They might be using them to track your location. Seeing what you access.”

“Maybe,” Bucky allows. “But I’ve gotten rid of enough of them that it doesn’t matter. If they want to come for me, I’m happy to kill whoever they send, too.”

Agent May crosses her arms. “You’re not operating alone. If you endanger yourself, fine, but there’s more than just you working on this mission.”

Clint doesn’t know how he’d categorize any of the expressions that flit across Bucky’s face, but Bucky ends up blank and nodding. At least Clint’s not the only one who keeps forgetting about teamwork.

Agent Preston gives Clint a look, and he remembers that conversation from before. “Hey, Barnes.”

“Yessir?”

“Just - Agent May is right.”

“Sorry,” Bucky says. He shakes his head. “I know. It’s been - a while. Sorry.”

-

Clint tries to convince the others to get a drink with him in celebration, but none of them are having it.

Only Barnes goes, “You eaten anything today?”

“Uh.”

“Besides protein bars,” he says, voice flat but amusement clear enough in his eyes.

“Well -”

“C’mon,” Bucky says. “I swear, I got the worst habit of picking up strays. Look, I spent seventy years traveling the world and hardly ever got to, y’know, sample the local cuisine. Least, not as far as I remember. So this time around?”

“This time around you’re … eating?”

“I ate,” Bucky says, disdainfully. “Just don’t fucking remember it half the time, and the other half it was MREs. This time around I’m doing it right.”

“I don’t get why I gotta -”

“Because you’re gonna fuck yourself up eating nothing but protein bars. C’mon. Unless you’re busy, which I kind of doubt. I mean, maybe you are, how should I know?”

Clint winces. His lack of leadership ability’s pretty obvious, but getting called on it still doesn’t sit well with him. “Well. No.”

“Then c’mon.” Bucky shoves his hands in his pockets. “I need to work on teamwork, you need to get to know your team. I’m the weakest link. Let’s get food.”

-

Clint's gotten his dick sucked plenty of times. During missions in progress, even. He hasn't gotten his dick sucked by a dude during a mission before, per se - nor immediately after, even, only like a week later, and unrelated to the mission, so it’s only after a mission in the way that Tuesday comes after Monday - but. That's a thing that's happened.

It's also not the first time he's had an ex-brainwashed not-ex-assassin suck his dick, but it's the first time said assassin's been a dude. It's a unique combination of events, even if none of the details are special on their own.

Plus, Bucky Barnes turns out to be super good at it. Clint's always really easy after a mission so Bucky might be getting extra points, but there's definite talent involved in the way Bucky uses his tongue.

"I kinda want to come all over your face," Clint says. It’s not his best line, but he’s had a couple drinks and it’s late and Bucky’s got a really pretty face.

Bucky lifts an eyebrow at him, managing to look threatening even on his knees.

"Trade ya?" Clint tries to offer, breathing ragged. "I come on yours, you come on mine, make it even -"

Bucky starts laughing, and the sound and movement against him is enough to get Clint off. He was real close already, but seeing somebody so damn cheerful and amused to be down there's a turn on and Clint is fine admitting that to himself.

Also, Bucky swallows, which Clint is fine with.

"You're such a fucking moron," Bucky says, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

"I was serious about the trade, though," Clint says.

Bucky laughs again, getting to his feet and undoing his pants. "Yeah?"

"Mmhm."

-

It's just - convenient, is all. Clint's single. Bucky's - something. Probably single; Clint's not asking. Dinner and a blowjob, no big deal. Clint has a type: competent, smarter than him, could totally kick his ass. Bucky fits all those criteria neatly, but that doesn’t mean anything because it’s not going to be anything.

The mission’s going to end, Maria’s going to realize how stupid it was to put Clint in charge of a team, and they’ll go their separate ways. Maybe before the mission ends they’ll hook up again, maybe not, if Bucky realizes what a mistake he’s making. Either way, Clint’s happy.

Bucky sleeps in his own bed.

Which - “You asshole,” Clint says. “You’ve still got clean sheets.”

“Yup.”

“Ugh.” Clint groans, throws the shitty hotel quilt aside, and hopes for the best. He tries not to sleep under the covers in hotels, most of the time. Getting tangled in the sheets is an issue if someone tries to murder him in the night, and he just doesn’t quite trust the laundry service. There’s no chance they’re the first people to have had some sort of sex in this bed.

After a brief period of time worrying about the provenance of the bedsheets, Clint finally gets to sleep. His alarm wakes him up in the morning.

“Christ, Barton,” Bucky says. “Your alarm’s the worst fucking thing.”

“Mmph.”

“Why are we even up this early?”

“Fuck if I know,” Clint says. “Wanna break into the factory tonight?”

“Yeah,” Bucky says. “Probably a good plan.”

“And today we … shit, I guess I’ll just have everybody keep doing what they were doing. I don’t know.” Clint rubs his hands against his face and swings his knees over the edge of the bed. After a moment’s thought, he sniffs at his armpit, nose crinkling up immediately. “I’m gonna shower. You wanna call room service, get some breakfast?”

“Room service,” Bucky says, somewhat wonderingly.

“It’s on Stark’s tab at this point, I’m pretty sure. Maybe? I don’t know who the fuck’s bankrolling us. Maybe it’s embezzled from the government.”

“As long as we can afford room service, I don’t care who’s paying,” Bucky says.

“You think they got those room service massages?” Clint tugs off his socks, which he never took off last night. That they lasted even while he slept is a surprise - he usually kicks them off and loses them in his bed someplace.

Bucky’s voice is firm and slightly terrifying. “You’re not paying room service for a massage.”

“I want one,” Clint says. He goes to take off his boxers, hesitates thinking maybe he should wait until he’s in the bathroom, then decides he doesn’t care since Bucky’s already seen his junk. “It’s my god-given right as a SHIELD agent.”

Bucky makes no pretenses about staring at Clint. Dude’s straight up ogling, and comparatively Clint feels sort of unworthy, but he’s not going to judge Bucky’s taste. “I’ll give you a fucking massage later if you don’t pay someone for one.”

“Well, if you insist.”

“I do.”

“Later, though,” Clint decides with a weary sigh. “I just decided I want to go over tonight’s gameplan with everyone. I know when the factory - when all the civvies leave, at least. The folks who don’t have shit to do with whatever’s going on there.”

Bucky says, “So what’s the goal for tonight?”

“Let me think about it.” Clint shakes his head. “I swear, I’m going to take this shower if it kills me. I’ll think about it in the shower.”

“Yeah, yeah, go. Get clean. You stink.”

“You’re one to talk.”

“What?”

“You don’t stink.” Clint holds his hands up, palms out. “Sorry. I was lashing out.”

-

They get into the building with an ease that’s more surprising than Clint wants to admit. Considering he’s got Natasha and Agent May and the Winter Soldier along - and the fact that he’s also one of SHIELD-or-whatever’s top agents, even if he doesn’t like to think about or brag about that - it’d be more surprising if things went pear-shaped.

Clint’s just used to things going wrong. They usually go wrong.

Tonight isn’t for wrecking shit or killing people, though. They’re all at their very stealthiest. He sends Natasha and Bucky in first, and Clint keeps himself up on a roof, ready to go in after anyone who needs help and there to give warning should anyone suspicious approach the entrance. There’s a building with a decent angle on the factory and he hangs out up there.

He has Preston hang back, in case everyone dies or gets kidnapped or something. She’s going to be working plenty hard tomorrow when they give her the data that the team gathers, anyway, doing most of the analysis.

Clint may not know a goddamn thing about leadership, but infiltrating buildings is something he can do. Or tell other people to do, as the case may be.

Sitting around on rooftops is a secondary specialty. He’s more comfortable up here than he was earlier, at least, even if he ends up not having to do anything.

There’s occasional radio chatter with the team - Natasha declaring that they’re in, Bucky warning the other two that some staffer is burning the midnight oil, Agent May reporting when she’s gotten more samples of whatever Hydra’s making. Natasha finds honest-to-goodness paper files and takes pictures. Bucky finds a computer, isolated from any outside networks, with actual useful data on it.

“These fuckers,” Bucky growls at one point, under his breath, but it’s still picked up on his mic.

“Shh,” Natasha says, from wherever she is. “Focus.”

Clint doesn’t ask. He maintains his current position and continues to observe the surrounding area. There’s a stray dog rooting around in a pile of trash on the street that he sort of wishes he could pet, but even the dog isn’t enough to make him miss the approach of a semi truck.

“We got company, guys,” he says, watching as the truck pulls around out of sight, toward the loading docks. He wishes he had a view of those, and actually gets up, creeping from his position toward the other end of the roof to see if he can see the truck. The corner of it just barely peeks out from the recessed area, but that’s enough verification. “Cargo shipment of some kind. You might want to get out. They’re unloading at the east side of the building.”

“I’m going to perform reconnaissance,” Bucky says.

“Nope,” Clint tells him. “We don’t know who it is, what they’ve got or how many of them there are. I want everybody out.”

Not a single person dies that night.

-

“I’m never gonna get to sleep,” Clint says. He’s flat on his back staring at the ceiling. “I keep thinking someone’s going to have followed us back here to kill us. Or they’re gonna - I don’t know. Turn off the hot water at the hotel as revenge for the break-in.”

“See, murder attempts I’m fine with. I understand that,” Bucky says. “But the hot water? That just sounds cruel.”

“And you’d know from cruel.”

“Mmhm.” Bucky laughs, albeit briefly. “I had enough of cold water in the forties. Like hell I’m going to put up with that now.”

Clint is goddamn exhausted. After the mission, he took the whole team out to breakfast. It’s still on SHIELD’s dime, so it wasn’t a huge commitment, but he’d kind of wanted to just sleep already at that point instead of spending forty minutes huddled around a table at a weird little Madripoor diner eating soup and deep fried dumplings. 

Clint tries rolling onto his right, then his left. Neither’s that comfortable. His stomach’s the worst. He ends up on his back again. The ceiling hasn’t gotten any more interesting since he started trying to get comfortable.

Bucky groans. “Go to sleep.”

Clint makes a whiny noise, mocking Bucky’s own. “Can’t.”

Clint hears rather than sees Bucky sit up in the other bed, shifting against the sheets. “You want to call in that backrub early, maybe? See if that helps?”

“What?”

“I owe you a backrub. When I threatened you about room service.”

“Huh,” Clint says. His body feels heavy, weighed down against the mattress. The ceiling’s a boring white. The texture of the paint pisses him off for no real reason. He wishes it were smoother. There’s a spot where it looks like maybe a long time ago the room above them had a leak and it got painted over.

He squints one eye open and watches Bucky walk over. Bucky’s in nothing but his boxers; dim light that’s snuck through the curtains gleams against his metal arm and makes his eyes bright in the darkness. “C’mon, roll over. On your front.”

“Ugh.”

Bucky pushes at his arm. “You want a massage or not?”

Clint considers this, and, with great effort, turns over, crossing his arms and resting his forehead against them. “If anybody’d told me a month ago I’d end up in Madripoor getting a backrub from the Winter Soldier, I would’ve … probably believed them, I guess.”

Bucky doesn’t say anything to that, just places his hands flat against Clint’s back. The metal one’s noticeably colder. “There anyplace that hurts?”

Clint shrugs halfheartedly.

“Fine, whatever.” Bucky laughs softly, and gets to work kneading his hands against Clint’s back. His right hand is dry and warm; the left at least seems to absorb heat quickly, no longer quite so cold, and slides smoothly even without lotion.

Bucky’s got skilled hands. Strong and deft and fucking spot-on at finding places Clint didn’t even realize were sore, and rubbing the discomfort away with expertly-applied pressure. Clint’s pretty into giving girls backrubs as an unsubtle preamble to getting into their pants, and he’s only very rarely on the receiving end. It’s nice.

Clint sighs and lets himself relax. “I keep thinking somebody’s gonna - bust in and try to kill us.”

“This might come back to haunt me, but I’m going to say we can handle it.” Bucky ceases his attentions for just a moment, rising to his knees on the bed and then straddling Clint’s back, easing back to sit on his legs. Clint doesn’t much mind, and gives the thumbs up, so Bucky gets back to work.

Clint does sigh heavily, though, thinking about what Bucky said. “Aw, no, don’t say that. You said it but - don’t say that. We’re doomed now.”

“I’d say I’m not that superstitious, but …”

Clint wonders if it’s possible to melt into nothing because of a massage. He’s not even that worried about getting killed by Hydra agents. Dying mid-massage is far from the worst death he can imagine. “You kind of came back from the dead.”

“A little, yeah,” Bucky says. A few shameful times in his life, Clint’s paid for massages at less-than-reputable spots that promised happy endings, and those weren’t as nice as this. Bucky’s stronger, for one, willing to really chase after and murder the knots and tension. No lingering sense of guilt, either.

“Hard to get too picky about superstition when you’ve fought a mythological figure,” Clint tells the mattress, more mumbly than usual. “And when you got a ghost story assigned to your team.”

“Mm.”

“Sorry. Should I not bring that up?” Clint’s usually really good at not talking about things. It’s kind of a skill. If a problem can be avoided so long that it goes away, that’s his tactic of choice. When shit needs to get done, he can do it, but he’s pretty sure he should ease off mentioning Bucky’s time with Hydra.

“Ehh.” Bucky sighs heavily. “It’s not like I didn’t earn that reputation.”

-

Preston and May spend the whole morning looking over the data the team stole last night, while Clint hovers around uselessly.

“Clint, stop it,” Natasha tells him a few hours into it. “Let’s go bring lunch back for everyone. Where’s Barnes?”

“Still asleep,” Clint says. He doesn’t mention that Bucky’s asleep in his bed; that’s definitely more information than the team needs. “Or he was when I left the room, anyway.”

“Hm.”

Clint puts on his biggest smile, which impresses precisely no one. “So what do you guys want for lunch?”

“Anything but protein bars,” Preston says.

Clint holds up a hand in protest, then lets it drop. His shoulders slump. “Are you guys all just talking behind my back, or what?”

“What?” Preston asks.

“I - never mind.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” May says.

“Fuck you guys. Natasha, c’mon, let’s find something gross.”

-

The fourth night, they get in a little quicker, now that the team is familiar with the interior layout. There are some areas they didn’t get to last time.

Clint, again, keeps an eye out from on high.

Tomorrow they’re going to bring the place down. Only - he hears someone else’s voice very distantly over their channel. He thinks one of the team’s microphones is picking it up. Maybe Preston is getting herself a snack or something, only then there’s shooting.

“We’re fucked,” Natasha says helpfully. “I got him before he could call for backup, but someone has to have heard. Security guard.”

“We want to blow this joint tonight?” Bucky asks. They’re on the team channel and Clint doesn’t feel like figuring out how to address only Bucky, so he doesn’t make a joke about blowing Bucky tonight, no matter how badly he wants to. Also, it probably wouldn’t be appropriate during an active combat situation.

“We’re not prepared -” May starts. Then there’s more gunshots. Up on the roof, Clint gets his bow ready and pulls out an arrow. He keeps low, not standing up, but watches the street even more carefully than before.

“Do you need backup?”

“Got it,” May says. “For now. We need to get out.”

A truck careens toward the building; Clint shoots a tire out and watches it crash. A gaggle of people in body armor pour out of it - one has to be dragged out from the crumpled vehicle. Smoke rises from the hood. Another one is limping. There are six of them, and Clint aims for the ones who aren’t injured first. He nails one.

“What’s the situation outside?” May asks.

“Not great. Got your back, though,” Clint says, keeping his voice low. Another arrow pierces a second man’s through the visor. By the time he gets a third, they’ve got an idea of where he is, and he’s not fast enough to get another off before they’ve aimed at him and the bullets are flying.

So he moves. The new angle worses his ability to aim without exposing himself to enemy fire, and they’re behind the wreck of the van now, popping up to fire at his shadow. Clint would rather not be stuck in a standoff here, both sides trying to wear the other down, especially not when there’s one of him and - well, two of them, at this point, since their last man’s still lying on the ground injured. He could get that kill shot, but it feels cheap.

Maybe if it would distract the others, though. He goes for it. The others are suitably distracted.

He lets them be, because them turning around gives him a chance to get his ass away from the edge of the roof and to the fire escape. He should stay up high, but he doesn’t want to leave his team inside.

He gets down to the ground, and sees - Bucky.

With a gun. Pointed at him. A dim streetlight halfway up the block is the only real light, besides that reflected from the clouds and smog overhead, and a sullen orange gleam reflects off the metal of Bucky’s arm.

The two remaining survivors from the Hydra van are talking in excited German, one of them addressing Bucky intermittently. Bucky’s responding. Clint wishes his German were better.

He’s got enough to piece together when one of the men from Hydra asks, “Aren’t you going to kill him?” The sound of a safety being disengaged in response needs no translation.

One of the bodies is maybe three feet to Clint’s right, arrow sticking out of his skull. The smell of blood is strong. Clint’s got an arrow ready, but he doubts he’ll be able to match Bucky in speed. He keeps an eye on Bucky’s hand, though.

Right as Bucky’s index finger starts to shift, Clint draws the string on his bow -

“Down,” Bucky says in Russian, and Clint wants so bad for this not to be a betrayal. It’s stupid of him, but he swings his shot wide to the right and drops to the ground, takes aim at one of the men from the van. Lets go.

Bucky takes his shot. The sound of it rings in Clint’s ears as the bullet passes maybe two feet overhead, if he’s being generous in his estimate.

Someone chokes, then hits the ground. Bucky spins around, gets the last of the two on the ground.

“Sorry,” Bucky says. “We need to go back in.”

“Aye aye, cap’n,” Clint says. His heart pounds against his ribs. “What’s the situation in there?”

“I have three more places I wanted to plant explosives -”

“There shouldn’t be any,” Clint says. “Those weren’t your orders.”

Bucky doesn’t break his gaze. “I wanted to be sure we could take it out. No matter what. I didn’t want - if something like this happened, I didn’t want security fucking us over.”

“You disobeyed orders.”

Bucky spreads his arms wide. “All right. Then follow yours.”

“What?”

“You’re supposed to kill me if I’m disloyal, right? I assume that’s part of the arrangement here.”

“Jesus,” Clint says. Forcing a choice this way is so cliche. That Clint has a reputation for giving second chances, and for playing a little fast and loose with the rules himself, doesn’t make it less annoying to deal with from someone else. “Don’t be cheap.”

“I’m already past my sell-by date,” Bucky says. “It’s fine. If you want to destroy that place, three more charges. I didn’t get the northeast corner. Came outside to try and avoid the personnel inside, and, well, you saw. So fine. Do it now; don't draw this out.”

“I’m not killing you. Fuck. Come on.” Clint takes a deep breath, and turns his back on Bucky, walking too-deliberately toward the building.

It takes a few moments before he hears footsteps jogging to keep up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey, i am asofterbucky on tumblr. come say hi and talk to me about clint/bucky or whatever.


	2. Chapter 2

One of the nice things about working for and with an organization of spies is that none of the team questions why the building was ready to blow tonight when that wasn’t in the plans shared with the group. Once the team is out and a safe distance away, Clint’s the one to hit the detonate button to set off the explosives.

None of them ask. Not May, not Preston, not Natasha.

Clint feels somewhat ill.

A call to Preston before they blew the building had her packing their things. Rather than return to the hotel for the evening they instead steal a car to drive out to the airport. Agent Preston gets clearance with the airport for them to take off an hour or so later - “We’re lucky it’s so late. There’s not many flights for us to delay.”

“So we just hope nobody comes to kill us for a whole hour,” Clint says. The hair at the back of his neck stands up, his skin prickling. He paces the breadth of the cockpit, which means he’s going maybe three feet before turning every time. Turning in such small circles makes him dizzy, but he doesn’t bother stopping.

“Get out of here,” Agent Preston finally tells him after several minutes of restless pacing. “And get Agent May for me, would you?”

“Sure thing,” Clint says, and he could tell Agent Preston to just call her, but looking for Agent May at least gives him something to do.

Agent May’s in the main lounge, sparring almost lazily with Natasha. Clint stops at the edge of the room to watch them. Neither of them looks worried or even particularly tired.

Clint envies them both. Watching them move proves relaxing, at least. They’re both impossibly skilled at hand-to-hand, and so graceful. Competence has always gotten to Clint. Even as good as he is, he always ends up feeling envious watching Natasha fight, and Agent May is his idol. There’s a lot to learn from the both of them.

“Clint.” Natasha doesn’t even pause. “Stop staring, it’s creepy.”

“Sorry. Agent May, Agent Preston wants you up in the … thing. The place.”

“Oh, the place,” Natasha says.

“Where you fly,” Clint says.

“Thanks,” Agent May says. Clint’s pretty sure she’s judging him, and he doesn’t even mind.

When she’s gone, Clint says, “Tasha.”

“Yes?”

“I - never mind. I’m just glad I didn’t get anybody killed on that mission.”

“I hoped you wouldn’t.”

Clint puts his thumbs through his belt loops and looks around the lounge. Having a plane with an area that can readily be called a lounge is cool. He’s going to miss it. “What do you think of Barnes?”

“We haven’t spoken much.” She shakes her head. “He did apologize for shooting me, though. I’m surprised he remembers. They were usually pretty thorough when they wiped him.”

“He shot you?”

Natasha snorts. “It should be on file somewhere. You can look it up. I’m lucky to be alive.”

“And you were fine working with -”

“Yes.” With May gone, Natasha starts going through martial arts forms on her own, just as fluid and graceful without a partner as with.

Clint nods to himself, folding his arms. “Okay. I guess that’s what I wanted to know, really. So you think we can trust him?”

“I don’t know.” She regards him earnestly. “Hydra sunk their teeth in deep. He’s not the person Steve used to know. He’s not the person I knew. I couldn’t tell you who he is now. I don’t think he could, either.”

Clint takes a deep breath and lets it out slow. “You know me better than anyone, Tasha. I’m a sucker for lost causes. If you think -”

“I trust you.”

“Right.”

“Don’t second guess yourself,” she says. “If you think he’ll be a danger to Stark Industries and to SHIELD, do what you have to. I’m too invested to make that call. He’d be a valuable agent, but I’m not sure it’s worth destroying SHIELD from the inside twice in two years just to help one person.”

“Thanks,” Clint says, and turns to go.

Natasha stops him with a hand on his shoulder. Clint stills but doesn’t turn. “I think he wants to redeem himself. I think he thinks he’s doing what’s right. But I don’t know what that means to him.”

Clint rubs at his eyes. “Or if there’s something left that could be triggered.”

Natasha doesn’t answer that, so Clint leaves. He’s tired. It’ll be hours and hours before they hit the west coast, and longer still to New York.

He climbs into his bunk and goes to sleep alone, without trying to find Bucky.

Bucky finds him instead.

-

The worst part about leading a team for a single mission, Clint discovers, is the paperwork. He always had someone else do it for him, before; usually his handler, either Phil or whoever was in charge at the time. He’d just sign where he was told and forget all about it.

None of the team allows him to pass the work on to them, though, so he ends up at a desk at the new headquarters Stark built down in DC and goes to work. For hours. Then he has to summarize all that to Maria in person.

At the end of it, she says, “So what’s your assessment of Barnes?”

“My assessment is that I don’t have an assessment.” He left the entire encounter on the street out. In the official version, he ran into Barnes inside the building when he went to provide support for his team. In the official version, he gave the order to rig the place to blow well before he’d ever planned to. That’s the nice thing about waiting until the last minute to do paperwork, is getting to make shit up. “It’s hard to say yet. I want to give him the benefit of the doubt.”

“Did he do anything to make you doubt him?”

“No.” Clint shakes his head. “He was - really useful, honestly. He did solid work. Helped us out a lot. Nothing he did would have helped the enemy, not that I saw, anyway. I - look, you know how I am about second chances.”

“That’s part of why I’m passed him off to you,” Maria says, sounding almost amused. “We want him on our side, and if he’s not loyal - if anyone can bring an agent ‘round to seeing things our way, it’s you.”

“I, uh. Thanks?” Clint worries that he should maybe mention him and Bucky having sex. That might, possibly, change Maria’s opinion here. But he also doesn’t want to own up to it, so he keeps quiet. “Well, thanks for the team, I guess. That was fun.”

“I actually want you to keep leading a team. She won't be joining you again, of course, but Agent May recommended you.”

“Oh. What?”

Maria heaves a heavy sigh. “Is there a reason not to give you a team, Barton? Besides self doubt?”

“I guess not? I don’t think I’m very good at leading.”

“What do you call what you did in Madripoor?”

“I guess that was leading, sure, if you want to call it that. I hardly knew what I was doing. My team led me more than I led them.”

“You somehow managed to get valuable intel and completed the mission ahead of schedule,” Maria points out. “You have a few days off while we analyze the materials you brought back. Keep your phone charged for once; you’re going to be on call if we need anything.”

“Sure. I mean - thank you, Commander Hill. I guess.”

“You’re dismissed,” she says, turning back to the primary monitor at her desk. Clint’s half expecting her to suddenly remember something that will make her reconsider this decision before he leaves, but the door closes behind him without another word from Maria.

-

Clint takes the train back up to New York, and gets an astonishing two whole days of peace before his phone rings. Even then, it’s not work. Technically. It’s sort of work.

He stumbles to the kitchen to pick up, yawning as he does. “Hey.”

“Afternoon, Agent Barton.”

“Bucky?” Clint hesitates. “Hey. What’s the situation? And - wait, it’s afternoon already?”

“Yeah. You didn’t check your phone when you picked up?” At the silence in response, Bucky barrels onward. “Fine, it’s two fifteen in the afternoon. Sunny but cold. Just above freezing. SHIELD’s still analyzing the data we brought back.”

“Thanks for the update…?”

“You asked what the situation was,” Bucky points out.

“Oh, I just figured something was wrong if you were calling.”

The line goes quiet, and Clint would think he’d been hung up on only there’s no dial tone.

“Everything okay?”

“Everything’s fine. I’ll talk to you later.”

After Bucky hangs up, Clint assesses the contents of his refrigerator. There’s nothing much to eat. “That was weird,” he tells his rows of cheap beer. He should really hit the liquor store later, stock up on something, anything, better. His refrigerator, unsurprisingly, refrains from comment.

Three hours, a trip to the liquor store and two and a half shitty Friends reruns later, Clint comes up with a thought. Bucky might have been bored. Only a select few agents with proper clearance even know he’s working for SHIELD right now, and keeping him secret from the other Avengers - especially Steve, but also Tony - is a priority. Banner probably isn’t as critical, but he counts as an Avenger so he’s out of the loop as well.

Trying to ascribe motivations to strangers isn’t necessarily Clint’s strong suit, but he doesn’t feel too out of bounds in guessing Bucky just might be bored and lonely hanging out at whatever Stark Industries-held property they’ve got him holed up in, which is weird but also not technically Clint’s problem.

He feels like kind of an asshole for not trying for normal conversation, but it’s not his fault, either.

Maria Hill doesn’t leave him too long to worry about it, either, as she calls right at nine the next morning asking him to come in for a mission briefing.

It’s a quick one - a jaunt into upstate New York to investigate a secret military base that was abandoned shortly after the end of Soviet Union. Nominally, SHIELD was involved in developing whatever went on there, but thanks to some analysis it’s come out that all the people involved were either known Hydra agents or affiliated with divisions known to be more heavily infiltrated than most.

There’s no individual briefings this time, as far as Clint knows - Maria gives them the information and tells them when to leave.

Clint raises his hand.

She sighs. “Yes, Agent Barton?”

“Do we get the jet again?”

Maria rubs at her temples. “Yes, you’re authorized to take the jet.”

Clint steeples his fingertips together, watching her intently. “Agent Coulson’s team got to bring a car with them. Can I have the sky cycle? Is that working again?”

Agent Preston says, “I’m pretty sure repairs after the last incident are finished. It should be working fine, as far as I know.”

Maria’s mouth tightens. “Thank you, Agent Preston. Can you - why do you anticipate needing the sky cycle, exactly, Agent Barton?”

“You never know. I could need it for - reconnaissance.”

Speaking up for the first time during the entire briefing, voice relatively quiet, Bucky says, “It could be mission critical. You really never know.”

“Barton is trained to pilot it,” Natasha points out casually. “And we don’t know what the condition of the roads in the area will be like. If we can’t have a flying car, we might as well have that.”

“What’s with flying cars, anyway?” Bucky asks. “Stark had a prototype when I was around the first time, and they’re still not popular?”

“You guys can talk about flying cars among yourselves later,” Maria says. “The sky cycle’s all yours. Don’t wreck it again.”

“Sorry, Maria,” Clint says, unapologetically cheerful. “How soon can we have the jet ready?”

“I can have you out of the city in an hour and a half.”

“Then we’ll leave in an hour and a half. Thanks, Commander Hill. You’re the best.” Clint stands up, pushing his chair in and bowing. He just manages not to knock his head against the back of his chair as he does.

-

The base is abandoned, as anticipated. There’s not a whole lot that Hydra left behind - it looks like they vacated years ago, though well after the facility’s official closing date.

Despite the lack of living Hydra agents, there are Hydra robots, and a whole host of defensive systems to be dodged, disabled, and nearly killed by.

“What the fuck even was this place?” Clint asks, panting for breath as he watches Bucky finish tearing the head off another security robot.

“Training facility,” Bucky says. He’s not out of breath, but his voice is a little short.

“In Soviet Russia, robot trains you,” Natasha says.

“Y’know,” Clint says, dodging under a sudden hail of laser fire from another robot that’s burst into the room, “I don’t think that’s how those jokes work?”

Natasha leaps and does this thing with her thighs and somehow topples the robot over, and then deactivates it -

“How did you even do that?”

“Their power source is in their chests,” Natasha says. “And there’s a big exposed wire coming out from it. Sever it and they go down.”

“Thanks,” Clint says. It proves helpful a few rooms later, when he manages to get up into the rafters and just shoot the damn things through their chests rather than bothering with combat on the ground. Natasha’s right beside him. “Seriously, when’s the last time you trained a robot?”

Bucky chimes in via the comm. “Someone has to program them.”

“How’s it going in there?” Agent Preston asks. She’s waiting back at the plane.

“Oh, you know. Peachy.” Clint wipes the sweat from his forehead. “Now we know Hydra has robots, at least, so that’s cool. These things are really shitty. No wonder I’ve never encountered them before.”

“You don’t want to kill your trainees before they can learn anything,” Bucky says over their comm channel. “We should try and find the control center. We might be able to disable them all.”

“Or what’s left, anyway,” Natasha says. “We should bring at least one of these back with us.”

They find the control room, where they have to fight even more robots. Bucky manages to input an override code that shuts them down all over the facility.

The decommissioned base yields some information that, as far as Clint is concerned, is absolutely critical. The old barracks were once used as bunks for Hydra trainees. They find a discarded t-shirt or two with the Hydra symbol on it - “They have t-shirts?” Clint asks, incredulous. “I don’t have a SHIELD t-shirt. Fuck this!”

“They’re not very subtle,” Natasha says.

“Well, no, but t-shirts. Fuck.” Clint shakes his head.

“All that time working for them, and they never gave me a shirt,” Bucky says. “Can you believe that?”

Besides the t-shirts, there’s also a list pinned to a wall still, with last names written on it, divvying up the chores for the day.

“This is so fucking stupid,” Clint says. “But hey, more names to look into. That’s fun.”

With the robots disabled, exploring’s a lot easier. There are still a few traps to be dealt with - there’s even a goddamn pit trap that Clint notices just in time. Hydra continue to be the worst. Going after them is a neverending job, and it’s not like they’re the only threat out there.

With Bucky on the team, though, Clint gets the feeling they’re not going to be assigned to much of anything besides Hydra duty. Not that he’s complaining, but the personal vendetta’s probably going to guide their trajectory.

“Bet we can get Hill to let us track those people down if we want,” Clint offers. “Nice little roadtrip. Skytrip? I want to get as much use out of this jet as I can.”

“What’s with you and the jet?” Bucky asks.

“It’s a Globemaster.” Clint holds his hands out, palms up. “From the 90’s! I thought SHIELD got rid of all these things, and now I get to use one, c’mon. Tell me that’s not cool.”

“Yeah, he’s just really easily pleased,” Natasha says, putting a hand to Bucky’s shoulders and urging him onward. “Don’t listen to Clint.”

Back at the jet, Clint sits down in the lounge, team assembled, and says, “Okay, so who’s calling to tell Maria we’re going on a field trip?”

“A what now?” Agent Preston asks.

“We found a list of people trained at that Hydra base.” Clint nods in a random direction, assuming everyone will know what he means. “And I think we should hunt them down. Find out what they know. If they’re still active. That kind of thing. That’s what we do, right? SHIELD? We fight Nazis?”

“It’s your call, Agent Barton,” Agent Preston says. “I’m gonna have to call my husband, tell him the mission’s running longer than we planned. I don’t want him to get dinner ready for four if I’m not there tonight.”

“We can have dinner another time,” Bucky tells her.

“You can - what,” Clint says.

“She invited me to dinner with her family.” Bucky shrugs. “I’m apparently not the weirdest houseguest she’ll have had.”

“He’s really not,” Agent Preston says. “And - oh, no. Thank god, the school play was last week.”

“All I’m at risk of missing is Star Wars night at the strip club,” Clint says. “And it’s really not as good as it sounds, so don’t worry about me.”

"I can call Maria," Natasha says. "If you're too lazy."

"I'm not too lazy, I just wasn't sure if I should delegate."

"Not for this."

"Okay, okay." Clint holds his hands up. "I won't delegate. Though - Bucky, you free?"

Bucky snorts. “I can find time in my busy schedule, don’t you worry.”

"C'mon up to the cabin with me while I make this call."

"Okay." Bucky looks at Preston, then Natasha, but neither of them has any answers. Preston at least shrugs. Natasha just stares at him blankly.

-

Up in the cabin, after calling Maria, Clint says, “So.”

Bucky stands at attention, face blank. He is very, very still.

“What - calm down, I’m not kicking you off the team or anything.”

That doesn’t make Bucky relax in the slightest.

“Oh, god, do you think you’re in trouble?” Clint rests one arm against the chair, and covers most of his face with his hand, leaning against it heavily. “I was going to ask if you wanted to take the sky-cycle for a ride. It was going to be really smooth. We were gonna make out.”

“Is - what?”

“I didn’t want to put you on the spot in front of everybody, but now they’re going to think you’re in trouble or something. Shit, I fucked up.” Clint punches the back of the chair, for want of something better to do.

“We can still do that.” Bucky’s shoulders shake like he’s trying not to laugh. “I’ve never been on a sky-cycle.”

“It’s the coolest thing, I promise,” Clint says, sitting up straight again. “Wanna race the jet to our next stop?”

“It goes that fast?”

Clint makes a face. “No.”

-

“You want to … race the jet,” Natasha says. She sits up slowly, one hand still on the map she and Agent Preston were going over before Clint and Bucky came back. “With two people on the sky-cycle.”

“I need backup.” Clint crosses his arms, head held high. It’s possible he should have come up with an excuse to bring Bucky along earlier. Having any reason to take the skycycle out at all would probably help, too.

“For what?” Agent Preston asks, incredulous.

“For - racing! What if I need Bucky to spot a - a low overpass that would be totally cool to race under?”

Neither Natasha nor Agent Preston say a word to that.

Bucky says, “What, are you afraid you’ll lose?”

“Not at all,” Natasha says. “Go, fine, have your weird male bonding ritual. I don’t care anymore. Just don’t crash.”

“We won’t crash. Scout’s honor,” Clint says, holding up a hand in what he hopes is a suitably Boy Scout-esque gesture. He got kicked out of the Cub Scouts after a single day, back when he was seven. Like hell he remembers if they’ve got any secret rituals or gestures.

They don’t, either. They nearly run into a goose, but other than that it’s smooth flying on the sky-cycle.

“Why the fuck aren’t these things everywhere?” Bucky yells, because that’s the only way to be heard over the wind. Even with him sitting right behind Clint, arms around Clint’s waist, it’s hard to hear him. The helmets don’t help with that.

Clint thinks about it. “No idea!”

A few minutes later, Bucky shouts, “When are we eating?”

Clint scans the ground beneath them. He has a few protein bars stashed in his pockets that he figured he could pull out if they got shot out of the sky or ran out of fuel. Occasionally, Clint plans ahead in case of disaster. “Dunno. I thought we wanted to get where we’re going.”

“I want lunch. And don’t you dare hand me a protein bar, Barton, or I swear I’ll shove it up your ass.” Bucky squeezes him tighter for a moment in playful warning.

Clint laughs. “Fine, shit. Next restaurant you see, we can stop.”

“Well, if you’d drive near a road -”

“You always this fussy?”

“Sixty years of brainwashing,” Bucky says, almost sing-song. “I think I’m allowed.” He’s got a point.

Clint steers them toward a road. There may or may not have been, at one point, some sort of directive about trying not to be seen with the sky-cycle, because it’s not for public use and SHIELD was sort of secret for a long time, but now that everything’s on the internet he’s pretty sure it’s fine.

If it isn’t, he’ll just say it was vital for the mission and for the integrity of his team, or get Natasha to help him come up with better jargon to justify trying to find a restaurant. Just coming up with an excuse for riding the sky-cycle instead of the plane is going to be hard enough.

“Anybody asks,” Clint says, “and this is a team-building exercise, okay?”

“Oh, is that what it’s called now?” Bucky lets a hand creep a little lower against Clint’s stomach, letting one finger just barely slip under the waistband of his pants.

“Mmhm.” Clint pauses. “Wait, shit, that is too obvious, isn’t it. Fuck. What’s our excuse?”

“Maria’s going to kill us. And - hey, restaurant.”

“That’s a truck stop -”

“The sign says restaurant. Land this thing.”

Not that Clint’s really one to judge when it comes to shitty taste in food, but Bucky’s from the distant past. Clint wants the present day to leave a good impression, which a truck stop diner will not. “It’s gonna suck.”

Bucky curls his fingers in, digging into Clint’s stomach a little. “I’m hungry and I haven’t seen anything else.”

“This is - you want to experience local food. Not whatever this is.”

“It’s local, it serves food,” Bucky says, so with a heavy sigh Clint lands the skycycle outside of the diner. The worst part is that Clint loves shitty diners. He practically lives out of the one closest to his place in Bed-Stuy. When he used to stay down in DC, in the SHIELD barracks, he’d trek into town by his lonesome and get terrible pancakes at a little joint just outside Adams Morgan.

The place is long gone now, he’s pretty sure, but it’s where he first learned to properly appreciate biscuits and gravy so it’s got a soft spot in his heart. He’s pretty sure this place won’t have good biscuits and gravy.

“You think they’ve got chicken and waffles?” Clint asks.

This stops Bucky cold. His head lists sideways in confusion as he squints at Clint. “What, both? They probably have chicken. They have to have some kind of chicken. Maybe pancakes…?”

“No, it’s - chicken and waffles,” Clint says. “It’s a thing. It’s a food.”

“You call a sandwich bread and meat, or what?”

“Bro,” Clint says.

Bucky waits.

“Okay, no, we can’t stand out here arguing about food they might not even have,” Clint says. Also, there are a few people standing at the window staring at the sky-cycle. Clint wants to get inside and make sure they get a seat with a view of the parking lot, in case any of the patrons get any ideas about stealing.

Not that any of them’ll be able to succeed - the sky-cycle’s got its own security features - but Clint doesn’t want to deal with that kind of hassle today.

The waitress who seats them is just as fascinated by the sky-cycle as the rest of the customers. “What’s that thing you rode in on?”

“Uh,” Clint says, and thinks maybe he should have thought this through better.

“Experimental vehicle,” Bucky says. “We’re doing the first cross-country test drive of it. It’s a new Ford. Probably won’t be on the market for a few more years.”

“Yeah,” Clint says.

The waitress gives a low whistle. “Well, I’ll be. We finally gettin’ those flying cars everybody used to promise, huh?”

“Maybe,” Bucky says. “Maybe not. It flies alright so far. It’ll take a lot of doing to figure out how to manage traffic if you’ve got cars and all just flying everywhere, though.”

“Hell, I’d take my driver’s test all over again if I could have one of them,” the waitress says wistfully. “Sorry, where’s my manners? Hiya. Here’s your menus. Soup of the day is chicken noodle. You boys want anything to drink?”

“Do you guys have chicken and waffles?” Clint asks. Bucky gives him a look, and Clint just shrugs.

“Not really on the menu, but sure,” the waitress says. “We’ve got both. I don’t see why not.”

“That’s not a drink,” Bucky says. “I’m gonna have a Coke, by the way. Please. If that’s okay.”

“Of course, hon,” she says, smiling. “And I know you want chicken and waffles, but were you just wanting water, or …?”

“Coffee,” Clint says. “Black.”

Halfway through the meal, a few truckers skulk around the sky-cycle, looking at it sort of covetously. Clint’s on edge, but they don’t do anything to it. One spits on the ground near it, but that’s the worst of it.

He’s still antsy.

Bucky eyes the window. No one’s near the sky-cycle. He gets up, and Clint watches him stand. “I’m gonna go to the bathroom. Follow me in thirty seconds.”

Clint looks out the window again, on alert. “What? Okay.”

He’s mostly convinced himself that Bucky’s discovered that the entire truck stop is staffed by Hydra, and he wishes he’d brought his bow inside, or a gun, or anything at all. He sneaks a butter knife into his sleeve before going to the bathroom.

Bucky’s leaning against a wall, looking casual as can be. He beckons Clint over. None of the stalls are occupied, Clint notes absently, so no one will overhear.

Still, he’d rather be safe, so he drops his voice to a whisper as he draws in close. “Is it Hydra?”

Bucky laughs in his face.

“What?”

“C’mere,” Bucky says, and his metal fingers feel cold against Clint’s neck as he pulls him in close. For maybe half a second Clint worries he’s about to get murdered, right up until he feels Bucky’s lips against his own.

That’s way better than getting murdered, it turns out. Kissing ranks higher than Hydra in Clint’s preferences, too. It’s right up there with making a tricky shot perfectly.

Bucky hasn’t shaved in a day or two, and his stubble’s scratchy. Even though it hasn’t been all that long, in the grand scheme of things, Clint feels like it’s been about a thousand years since he last got kissed. Bucky’s got one hand resting lightly against his neck and the other creeping up under his shirt, down at his side.

Clint braces one hand against the wall and tries to see if it’s physically possible to stand any closer to Bucky than he already is. Turns out it is.

Shifting his weight a little, Clint tilts his head down to kiss at Bucky’s jaw. When Bucky lifts his chin, Clint takes it as an invitation to kiss at his throat. As he does, Bucky strokes his fingers lightly against the nape of Clint’s neck.

“Okay,” Bucky says, sliding his hand to Clint’s shoulder. “We should probably go.”

Clint licks his lips, then nods. He steps back. If that’s it, then that’s it. He’s not about to complain; hooking up in a truckstop bathroom would have been a bad idea anyway. Nat’d yell at him about hygiene. There is one problem with leaving, unrelated to kissing: “Aw, man, I was gonna get dessert.”

Bucky’s brow furrows. “You want to get dessert?”

“Yeah,” Clint says. “What’s wrong with dessert?”

-

They get dessert.


	3. Chapter 3

The missions fall into an easy pattern, after that. Mostly Clint gives up on sky-cycle field trips, though having it along does factor in during a particularly weird chase in Colorado. The team criss-crosses the country in the jet, which has been retrofitted with Stark Industries-provided fuel systems that are a thousand times more efficient than they’ve got any right to be.

None of the research chemicals Hydra’s been selling seem relevant. A flagrant abuse of the US legal system, sure; the only reason none of the drugs they’re selling are illegal is because they’re too new for any laws to cover.

Odds are the enterprise just funds Hydra’s more dangerous endeavors, but Clint’s got a bad feeling about the whole thing.

They ferret out Hydra, and a few AIM splinter cells on Hydra’s payroll. The team eats at shitty diners and fancy restaurants and out of the plane’s supply of MRE’s when there’s no other choice; Bucky always whines when they’re down to packaged foods so they try to avoid it.

“If you’d told me a year ago I’d be on a jet trying to convince the Winter Soldier to eat his dinner,” Preston starts, then pauses. “No, you know what? I would have believed you. I’ve worked for SHIELD long enough. I absolutely would have believed you.”

Natasha drinks pointedly from the little juice-box included with her meal. “I was going to say.”

“Just because they’re better than they were in the war doesn’t make ‘em good,” Bucky grumbles. “You know how many of these fucking things I’ve eaten over the past - I don’t even know how long. I could not tell you how long.”

Natasha considers this for all of a second. “I’d guess sixty years.”

“They were worse for part of it, though,” Bucky says, stabbing at the beige-colored meal with his fork. “You think Hydra was shelling out for the nice ones? No way. Beef stew, nonstop. The Soviets weren’t any better. Stingy bastards.”

“At least you got to eat,” Clint says, and immediately regrets it.

“What else was I gonna do?” Bucky asks. At least he seems amused by Clint’s comment rather than offended. “Just not eat for half a century? Yeah, that’s a real great idea. Awesome. Starve your best weapon.”

“Is this where you two are always disappearing to?” Preston sounds thoughtful, looking between the two of them. “Are you taking Bucky to dinner?”

Clint holds his hands up and shrugs. “I gotta shut him up somehow.”

“Hey, now,” Bucky says, flicking a blob of sauce at him. Clint nearly retaliates, but then remembers that Natasha would judge him pretty hard. For once, he’ll be the better man and let it slide. He wipes his cheek off with his sleeve.

Preston sits back in her chair, taking a long drink of water. “I can’t believe Bucky’s eating better than the rest of us. I thought we were a team.”

“I’m eating pretty good for once, too,” Clint says too quickly, before realizing that won’t help. Preston does sort of have a point. “Okay, fine, you guys want to come get dinner, we can all get dinner. Team-building!”

There are two reasons Clint hasn’t invited Natasha and Preston along for dinner before. One is that he doesn’t actually know what the team’s budget for food is, and the other is that he’s gotten kind of fond of making out with Bucky in weird places.

After missions they’ve been hooking up regularly. It doesn’t seem to transfer beyond that - sometimes they have sex, sometimes they make out for a while. They don’t cuddle or hold hands or whatever. They don’t talk about it.

Clint hasn’t asked if it means anything. Probably it doesn’t. He thinks maybe it could, at some point, if he wanted it to. He guesses Bucky might even be in favor of it, only Bucky doesn’t make a move toward turning it into anything else. The two of them are probably friends and sometimes they hook up, which is good enough for Clint.

Either they’ve kept it subtle well enough or Natasha and Preston don’t care; neither’s commented. Clint’s cool with either situation. Sometimes hanging around with spies and secret agents is bullshit. Other times it’s awesome.

Part of him suspects that, were they in New York, Natasha would be more prone to meddling. Being in the middle of a string of missions has her focused and less likely to get bored or distracted. As long as Clint performs well on missions, she tends to leave him alone to do whatever else he wants. It’s when he starts drinking too much, or wasting time and not actually following through, that she gets mad.

After a bit of a shaky start for the team, things have evened out. Clint still isn’t entirely sure he should be leading them, but he fumbles on through it and so far none of the good guys have died, and they’ve killed a lot of neo-Nazi shitheads.

Though zero casualties are preferable, Clint’s not overly concerned. Commander Hill hasn’t called him up to yell at him about any of the mission reports they’ve sent in. No way is Clint going to complain about getting a little more leeway when it comes to Nazi hunting.

A few days into their field trip, Clint realized how much he hated doing those reports, so now the whole team gets to fill them out together. Technically they’re meant to submit individual reports. That’s better protocol, but there’s enough else going on in the world right now that he doubts a little poorly-handled paperwork is going to be what gets him in the end.

The team does have one major problem, which is that they’re not really getting anywhere. They’ve shut down some bases and caught some minor players in Hydra’s drug running underbelly, but they haven’t gotten anything on Hydra’s remaining higher-ups, nor any information on how Hydra is restructuring itself or who’s filling the power vacuums created immediately in the wake of the DC incident.

Everyone they’ve interrogated has been low level enough as not to know anything. Cutting Hydra’s funding out from under them is an admirable goal, but Clint wants to do something more important.

Also, there’s only so long they can spend on this. Other things crop up - a meteor crashes into a remote part of Russia, presumably of alien origin. The American-educated rogue dictator of a small Eastern European country starts causing trouble at his country’s New York embassy, while claiming to be a magician and/or inventor - Clint’s really not clear, because his team doesn’t make it until after Victor von Whatever’s gone home in a huff.

Right after that, Maria wants to meet with him, then he needs to get his dog back from his ex, and the team don’t really have a specific goal in mind so they get reassigned. They’re still a team, just working sporadically.

Clint kind of likes getting to decompress at home again at least.

He spends the first few days thinking he’ll miss getting laid on the regular, then Bucky calls him up and asks him if he wants to get milkshakes and he figures he’s set.

-

“And I was thinking,” Bucky says, slurping obnoxiously at the straw to get the last dregs of his milkshake out. “You can’t cook. I can’t cook.”

“Those are facts, sure,” Clint says. He shifts a little on the stool, letting his knee knock against Bucky’s.

Bucky’s mouth quirks up in a smile as he looks down at the counter. “We should sign up for a cooking class.”

Clint draws back, face scrunched up. “A what? I can’t cook.”

Bucky’s little smile turns into a self-satisfied grin. “That’s what the class is for, dumbass.”

“I mean, I guess technically that’s true,” Clint says, fiddling with his straw and peering into the near-empty depths of his glass. “But I don’t trust it.”

Bucky bumps his knuckles against Clint’s cheek. “You don’t trust cooking classes.”

Clint catches Bucky’s hand with his own. He curls his fingers tight and wiggles his hand side to side, like their hands are doing a little dance. Regretting the maneuver almost instantly, he lets go. “Right.”

“Okay,” Bucky says. They go home and fuck and Bucky doesn’t bring up the cooking class again that day. He does get a gleam in his eye when Clint’s pouring out cereal for the both of them the next morning, but doesn’t say anything about it then, either.

-

Three days later, someone knocks on his door. Lucky lifts his head, looks at the door, and then flops back down on the couch, totally unbothered.

Clint cracks the door open, sees it’s Bucky, and lets him in. Bucky only takes a step or two inside before saying, “Okay, put on your coat, we’re going.”

“Where are we going?”

“You’ll see,” Bucky says.

Clint turns to look at his dog, who still hasn’t moved, then back at Bucky. “Is this a really elaborate murder scheme?”

“You wouldn’t know if I wanted to kill you.” The way Bucky says it, that sounds like a totally normal thing to tell someone. “You’d just be dead.”

“Well, I’m glad you have so much faith in me.”

“Sorry,” Bucky says. He grabs Clint’s hand, just for a second, to pull him out of the apartment, then lets go while Clint locks up. “You’re good at shooting things with arrows. I’m good at assassinating people. You know how it is. Specialization and all.”

“Okay, true,” Clint says. Bucky does not take his hand again. Clint doesn’t reach for Bucky’s, either. It’s fine. “Seriously, where are we going?”

“North.”

“Okay, that’s a direction. Not very helpful.”

“Well, northwest if you want to be technical.” Bucky looks around the sidewalk, then up toward the roof of Clint’s building. “Hey, do you have the sky-cycle?”

“They don’t actually let me take it home, you know.”

“Hey.” Bucky holds his hands up in mock surrender. “You never know. I’m gonna hail us a cab.”

The mystery of it all is honestly sort of annoying, but Clint puts up with it because Bucky seems to think it’s hilarious and complaining any more’ll just make Bucky get all smug.

“What’re you smiling at?” Bucky asks.

Clint rubs at his face and laughs. “I don’t know. This is really stupid.”

“Is not,” Bucky says. The cab drops them off not long after, and Bucky gestures at a building. “Et voila!”

Nothing makes the building stand out in Clint’s eyes. It looks like a generic office building, with a buzzer out front and no signs on the front besides the street number. “What?”

“C’mon.” Bucky heads inside, making a beeline for the elevator like he’s been here before. “We’re learning how to make Mexican food.”

Clint stops dead in his tracks. “Aw, no.”

Bucky turns on him, pinning him in place with a sharp-toothed grin alone. “You like Mexican!”

“I like Mexican when I’m not fucking up making it,” Clint says, digging in his pocket so he can text Natasha Bucky is very sneaky and a jerk.

Bucky takes Clint’s phone, sticks it back in Clint’s pocket, then grabs both of Clint’s hands. He stares Clint straight in the eyes, voice stern with mock severity. “You have to do this, Clint. For the team. For me.”

-

It’s mostly fine. Clint lights some chicken on fire, which isn’t great, but Bucky does tolerably well.

“They had a knife skills class,” Bucky whispers at one point, as he’s trying to chop some vegetables, “but I figured we had that covered. The fuck did I know?”

Clint regards his own cutting board mournfully. “We’ve got the wrong knife skills.”

-

They go back the next week for a class in southern Indian cooking. Then the next for seafood, then a pizza making class.

In between, there’s missions - an oil-drilling operation off the coast of Alaska apparently rouses the ire of the people of the lost city of Atlantis; there’s no battle, but the Avengers are waiting in the wings while diplomatic negotiations begin.

There’s one mission, where the prince of goddamn Atlantis comes to the UN to sign treaties and posture angrily. Technically what he does first is get himself a lawyer, in the form of Matt Murdock, then he goes in for the treaties.

The very first agreement signed is with the weird eastern European dictator, who, Clint learns, is named Doom, which is maybe the best name for a power-mad despot. Clint’s into it.

Though it’s technically just a diplomatic meeting, the Atlantean prince has been a little destructive and no one trusts Doom, so Captain America and Thor are both on hand for the actual meetings - ostensibly, Cap’s there as an additional envoy since the president can’t make it, and Thor is representing his home world for some incomprehensible reason. It’s pretty clear they’re just muscle in case shit goes down.

Clint’s team isn’t exempt from security detail duties, since Clint and Natasha are Avengers anyway and Preston’s useful to have around despite not being on the team. Clint’s jokingly offered her a position with them, but she says SHIELD is already more than she wants to deal with. The Avengers Initiative is a no-go for her. 

Clint assigns himself a position in a beautifully convenient sniper’s nest across the street. Natasha will be inside in the audience, in civilian clothes and with a holographic disguise for her face; Preston will be with her but not in disguise since no one’s about to recognize her. Now Clint just has to figure out what to do with Bucky. “So you can stay back at the SHIELD office and -”

“I want to come on this mission,” Bucky says, cutting Clint off. He folds his arms.

“This is Avengers stuff, though,” Clint says. “There’s gonna be - you know. Captain America. The guy you’re still hiding from?”

“I’ll stay up high. He won’t even know I’m there.”

“Okay?” Clint shrugs. “I mean, if you want. That’s fine.”

Bucky swallows hard but doesn’t waver or look away. “I always used to have his back. We had a promise. I’m not going to let him down now.”

Nothing Avengers-worthy goes wrong during the political negotiations. Atlantis and Latveria become allies; the Atlantean diplomat stays for hours, talking with both Doom and other world leaders, then leaves peacefully to vanish beneath the murky waters of the Hudson, where a silent group of blue-skinned sea people wait to meet him.

Clint watches all of this from afar. Bucky, from what Clint can tell, just watches Steve.

-

Bucky starts doing this, sometimes: when Steve has a mission, he’ll go and follow in secret. Clint usually doesn’t tag along, unless it’s something he’s involved in anyway.

A sadness settles over Bucky, seeming to weigh him down. His infrequent smiles grow rarer, and Clint can’t think of anything else to do so he starts dragging Bucky along more places - restaurants, art museums - never the history museum, that’d be weird - and shitty dive bars with live jazz, and whatever movies they can fit in.

He hopes it helps.

-

At some point Bucky starts hanging out with Natasha as well. “Shared experiences,” Bucky says, shrugging his shirt off. “We work together. We’ve both had - other people in our heads.”

Clint doesn’t say anything. For him it was only a few days, not a lifetime or two.

“Don’t worry.” Bucky winks, then lays down. He waves a hand vaguely toward his own back before folding his arms and resting his head against them. “She’s too young for me.”

“You calling me old?”

“No, no,” Bucky laughs. “It’s not - I don’t know. I don’t have a whole lot of peers.”

“Is there …” Clint frowns, and sits on the bed, trying to figure out the best tack to approach both the conversation and the backrub Bucky’s unceremoniously asked for. The backrub’s easier - just press as hard as he can. He may as well go with the same tactic for his next question: “What about Steve?”

Every muscle in Bucky’s body tenses up at once. “I can’t.”

“You can’t?”

“The things I did,” Bucky says. “I nearly killed him.”

“Pretty sure he forgives you.”

“I know,” Bucky says. “Fuck, I know. And he shouldn’t, you know? I didn’t even know him.”

Clint’s heard different, but it’s not his place to say.

“I hardly even remember … we grew up together, and there’s so much that’s just gone. Or I’ll think I remember something, but I don’t know if it’s real or if I’m just putting things together and hoping, or what.”

“Aw, no,” Clint says. “Sorry I brought it up.”

“Shut the fuck up; don’t apologize.”

“Okay.” Clint rubs at Bucky’s shoulders, rubbing in firm, steady circles and slowly working lower.

“He was the whole reason I didn’t mind goin’ off to war,” Bucky says, quiet. “I remember that part. He wanted to go so bad, do his duty, and he couldn’t, and it was like - at least I could do that for him. That’s what I figured. I swear, cross my heart. How stupid is that?”

“Guy inspires a lot of people,” Clint says.

“Sure,” Bucky says, quietly. “Sure.”

“Sorry I brought that up,” Clint says, and kisses the back of Bucky’s neck.

“I should go.”

-

Clint tries to make himself a pot of coffee. He mostly succeeds, only he got his mug out upside down and when he pours it, hot coffee goes goddamn everywhere.

He jumps back, drops the coffee pot, and flails his hands trying to get the splashed hot coffee off. The dropped pot doesn’t break, but he does slip in the coffee on the floor and lies there staring at the ceiling wondering what it is he did in life to get to this point.

He didn’t think - him and Bucky weren’t anything in particular, not really. They’re coworkers who sleep together sometimes, and go to cooking classes other times. Fifteen minutes ago, he had Bucky shirtless and prone on his bed, and now he’s lying on his kitchen floor debating if it’s worth cleaning up after the coffee disaster.

Of course it is.

That’s Clint’s thing. He fucks up, then he picks himself up and keeps going. He doesn’t have a choice but to keep going. At least with the coffee, he knows exactly how he fucked up. How he managed to drive Bucky off is a mystery.

Clint’s driven people off before. That’s nothing new. Usually it’s not quite that obvious - he can take a hint when he gets blown off a few times in a row or whatever. Getting walked out on mid-massage is a new low, but Clint’s always finding those. It’s fine.

He gets up, grabs some paper towel, and starts cleaning up. Then he puts on another pot of coffee, and this time just drinks it straight from the pot instead of bothering with a mug, since the last one betrayed him.

His evening can't get much worse at this point, so he takes a risk and orders Chinese from the slightly sketchy joint down the block he's never dared order from before. It doesn't improve his day any, and he's up until three in the morning with a stomach ache that never pays off. Even after that, he's awake again by six.

Clint spends the next day doing target practice at the range, alone.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Clint's got some wrongheaded thinking in this chapter especially.
> 
> Also there's around 2 chapters left, by my estimate.

The next time the Avengers all have to turn out for something, Clint somehow ends up on ground level fighting alongside Steve and Natasha, but he keeps looking toward the rooftops. He thinks he spots Bucky. There’s not a lot he can do with this information. Bucky’s here because of Steve.

Clint should have figured, really. He heard about DC. History wasn’t his best subject in school, but everyone learns about Steve and Bucky during lessons on World War II, and he’s read all the files.

This is how Clint figures it: Bucky’s in love with Steve, and has been since the 1940s. Maybe the 30s, even. At no point did he think Bucky was in love with him, or that they’d ever be anything other than whatever they were, but he still feels sort of stupid.

Somehow he hasn’t been to a strip club in months, so he goes, and gets himself a damn lapdance. He tips the girl well. It’s less fun than he remembers.

-

Bucky is very quiet on the next mission, so much so that Preston, when she gets a moment, asks Clint, “Is Agent Barnes alright?”

“No clue,” Clint says honestly. He sits down in the copilot’s seat and looks out at the clouds and sky ahead of them, then back to Preston with a shrug.

“You’re better friends with him than I am,” she says. “You should ask. I’m a little worried.”

“He did spend like sixty years brainwashed,” Clint says. “He’s allowed to be a little down.”

Preston is quiet in response to that. “It just seemed like he’d been doing pretty well.”

“I think it’s - he was saying something about Steve,” Clint says. “And how he doesn’t think he can talk to him. How he’s not worthy. I don’t know.”

He doesn’t get a chance to ask; they bring the jet down in a field and approach the base and Clint can’t really figure out a good way to bring it up that doesn’t alienate Bucky. Whatever Clint did to push Bucky away, he doesn’t want to make it worse.

They capture a Hydra agent high-enough ranked that Clint actually recognizes him - not only is the guy Hydra, but he’s a politician of ill enough repute even Clint’s heard of him. Natasha’s the one who finds him and sedates him, but she’s not the one to interrogate him.

“I’ll do it,” Bucky says. The plates of his left arm resettle with a metallic clatter as he clenches his fists, muscles going tense.

“You sure?” Clint asks.

Bucky looks at him.

Clint holds up his hands and takes a step back. “Okay. You’ve got this; I trust you.”

For a moment, Bucky’s expression flickers into something impossibly sad, then he’s all impassive, cold anger again. Clint wants to do something. It’s not his place.

“Go for it,” Clint says, gesturing Bucky into the compartment on the jet where their hostage is currently waiting. The door closes. He turns to Natasha, to Preston. “I’ll observe. Preston, can you get us in the air?”

There’s a video feed of the room that Clint watches.

Bucky doesn’t show mercy. The Hydra operative tries a few phrases in different languages, looking smug at first, then more terrified when he realizes they’re not working - overrides, Clint assumes, for the Winter Soldier, that are apparently no longer operational.

Watching it progress from there isn’t easy, though this is far from the first interrogation Clint’s witnessed. Clint’s done things he regrets, from getting a little too drunk at a strip club and having a bouncer kick him out, to killing people who didn’t quite deserve it. He shies away from torture, usually, but he’s never been in a place to call it off before.

From the look on his face, when the camera catches it, Bucky has no regrets.

A dreg of a memory, from SHIELD files on the war - nothing they’d ever have mentioned in history class - reminds him this is what Bucky used to do during the war, too. Clint can’t imagine Steve torturing anyone.

Clint’s not even sure it’s right, but he’s not the one who lost decades of his life to brainwashing and cryo. He could stop this and he chooses not to.

When Bucky’s done, Clint’s waiting by the door. Bucky’s knuckles have blood on them. There’s blood on his boots, enough that one of his footprints is a bloody stamp against the floor.

“Hey,” Clint says. Clint looks away, then forces himself to meet Bucky’s eyes. “You, uh …”

Bucky stares at him. “You watched all that, right?”

“Yeah.”

“I can’t - you see why I can’t talk to him.”

“C’mere,” Clint says, and opens his arms up, half of a mind to wait for Bucky to come to him, but he finds himself taking the three steps necessary to put his arms around Bucky first.

Bucky crumples against him, his face to Clint’s shoulder. “I got what we needed, at least.”

“You can tell me later.” Clint reaches for Bucky’s hand, and brings his bloody knuckles to his lips. The metal’s cool against his skin, and he turns his head, rests his cheek against it.

Bucky stills, and takes a deep breath, but doesn’t draw away.

“Sorry.” Clint lets go of his hand and stares resolutely at the wall, rubbing at Bucky’s back. “You don’t have to - if you don’t want to do this, then I can. Natasha’s capable, too.”

Bucky doesn’t say anything.

“I’m not …” Clint starts. He frowns. “I’m not him, is all. I don’t need protecting.”

-

One fun thing Clint learns about leading a team is that, technically, it’s his call if Bucky overstepped his bounds in interrogating the prisoner. If he needed to, he could have Bucky formally sanctioned or brought in front of a SHIELD review board for overstepping the bounds of his orders. Or he can say that everything Bucky did was necessary and justified, and that he ordered it in the first place. 

The next night, the team’s back in New York and Bucky knocks on his apartment door at two AM. Technically, the front door of the building’s locked, so Bucky shouldn’t have been able to make it in on his own, but Clint’s not gonna ask - one of his neighbors could have let Bucky up, or Bucky could have broken in.

It doesn’t matter.

Bucky doesn’t even say anything when Clint opens the door, just shoves him up against the wall and kisses him hard, and Clint goes along with it. Everything about Bucky screams desperation, the way he clutches at Clint and presses up against him, the possessive way he bites at Clint’s neck and throat, and later Clint’s thighs, hard enough to bruise.

Clint’s been there. He’s got issues of his own and this is as good a method of stress relief as any.

After, though, Bucky doesn’t leave. Clint’s used to Bucky leaving. He sort of expects it. He wouldn’t mind Bucky staying, only - the way Bucky left last time, he kind of figured that wouldn’t happen.

“Your DVD player set up?” Bucky asks.

“Why wouldn’t it be?”

“I don’t know. Natasha was telling me stories.”

“Just because one time …” Clint starts, then sighs. “Okay, so it took me three months to actually plug everything in right. It works now. It’s fine.”

“You want to watch something?”

“Pick whatever,” Clint says, waving a hand at his DVD collection. “I got chips?”

“Not hungry.”

“Okay.” That’s how Clint ends up staying up until the sunrise watching Tango & Cash with a trained assassin, his dog curled up between the two of them. Bucky’s half asleep by the end of the movie. Clint lets him rest.

A few hours later, when they’re both nominally awake again, Clint says, “So hey.”

“Hey.”

“About yesterday.”

Bucky’s expression turns impassive.

“You should really - you should talk to Steve, you know?” Clint says. “You were saying - maybe you think you’re not worthy, but you are, you know? And that’s not just because Steve’s … Steve. You’re really ...” Clint pauses, struggling to find the words.

“I should,” Bucky says. “It’s just weird. I don’t even think he wouldn’t forgive me. That’s not the problem.”

“I think you just think you’re a lot worse than you actually are,” Clint says. “You’re a way better person than you give yourself credit for.”

Bucky looks away, resting his hand on Lucky’s head and scratching his fingers absently through the dog’s fur. Clint watches, transfixed as ever by the motion of the metal joints. If he needs an excuse he’ll say he was looking at the dog.

Bucky’s voice is nearly inaudible. “Yeah, fine.”

Clint leans in. He wants to touch Bucky and can’t bring himself to. He can’t bring himself not to, either; he scratches behind one of Lucky’s ears and pretends it’s accidental when his hand brushes up against Bucky’s own. “What?”

“Fine, I’ll talk to him.”

“That was easy.”

“It’s just - you’re right, I guess. I keep thinking if I put it off, I can find some way to repent. Make up for what I did. But how long am I going to keep doing that?”

Clint bumps his hand against Bucky’s, more intentionally this time. He doesn’t cover Bucky’s hand with his own or tangle their fingers together or anything, just rests his hand there. Lucky’s tail thumps against the couch cushions.

“Sorry,” Bucky says. “Think I’m going to get a haircut.”

“Aw,” Clint says. He bends to bury his face in the soft fur of Lucky’s neck, the top of his head resting against Bucky’s arm. Bucky pulls away, though, and Clint sits back up, scratching at Lucky’s head again.

“Just so I look a little less.” Bucky tugs at the ends of his hair and makes a face before attempting a smile. “Y’know. I don’t want him worrying about me more than he has to.”

“Sure.”

-

The next time Clint finds reason to be at the Avengers tower - a few days later, because Tony’s promised him some fancy new trick arrows - Bucky’s there, too, which answers one question.

Bucky is also in the lab, sitting up on a tabletop and fiddling with his left arm, which is - not entirely in one piece. Clint’s seen the plates shift and settle any number of times, but he’s never seen them in the current state of deconstruction; the arm barely resembles an arm so much as a loosely connected jumble of metal and wire.

“Don’t mind him, he’s been here for hours stealing my tools,” Tony says dismissively. “Get over here. I think you’re gonna like these, MASH.”

“Aw, MASH,” Clint says. “I got so used to bird jokes, I wasn’t expecting MASH.”

“The bird theme’s old. We’ve got Falcon for that now. You get your own thing,” Tony says. Whatever he’s doing involves waving his hands at a table-sized holographic representation of something mechanical.

“I didn’t even know there were bird jokes,” Bucky says, over the whine of something in his arm. “I feel like I really missed out.”

“Did you ever,” Tony says. He flicks a paperclip Bucky’s way. Bucky manages to block it with his screwdriver. 

“Now I want to make one, but I get the feeling they’d all be old,” Bucky says. “And you know, that really ruffles my feathers.”

“I’ve heard that one,” Clint says.

Bucky just grins. “Hey, me’n Steve are getting lunch later, if you wanted to tag along.”

“Already ate,” Clint says. “Tony. Show me these arrows.”

-

At least Bucky’s less sad after their next mission. He spends probably half the mission yelling at Steve to stop being such a reckless idiot, then throws himself headlong into a throng of angry rebel Atlanteans who’ve decided to try and conquer New York against their leader’s express wishes.

Fighting off the invasion force at Steve’s side has him happier than Clint’s seen him, Bucky’s smile open and genuine as he slings an arm around Clint’s shoulders and says, “So what’re you doing after this? Do people still go dancing? And don’t you dare say anything about pole dancing, we’re not goin’ to one of your strip clubs.”

“I go other places. There’s not usually dancing anyplace else, though,” Clint says, and he doesn’t have it in him to duck away from Bucky. Maybe he leans in a little closer. He looks up, though - “I think Steve wants to talk to you.”

Steve waves when Bucky looks over, and only then does Bucky pull his arm away. “Buck, hey!”

“I’m gonna…” Bucky trails off, nodding his head once in Steve’s direction.

“Yeah, I know.” Clint pushes lightly at his shoulder. “Go, go.”

“I’ll call you later.” Bucky lifts a hand, and for a second Clint think he’s going to - Clint’s not sure what. What he does is ruffle Clint’s hair.

Clint ducks away and laughs. “No, don’t worry about it. You don’t have to -”

Bucky hesitates, smile dropping slightly. “You tired?”

“I just figure, if you’re busy tonight - it’s cool,” Clint says. He wants to grab Bucky by the collar and kiss him, wants to go back to traveling the country with him without Steve nearby to worry about. He wants things how they were before, or he would, if Bucky weren’t clearly happier after that reconciliation. “But you can call if you want. Or just come over. If you want. I just mean it’s fine if you don’t want to, too.”

“Right, okay,” Bucky says, confusion evident on his face. “I’ll text first, see if you’re up later. Is your phone charged?”

“Should be.” Clint shrugs. “Hey. Nice haircut, by the way. You look, you know, groomed for once.”

That gets a laugh. “Thanks. Look, I’ll see you later.”

Clint’s thinking about going home to sleep, until Tony yells at him, “Barton! What the hell are you doing over there? C’mon, I’m renting out a club and you’re coming.”

“Do I get my own table? I’m only coming if I get my own table.”

“You can have your own floor, for all I care,” Tony says. “We just saved New York from fish people!”

“They’re Atlanteans, not fish people,” Bruce says; he’s apparently managed to find or liberate a new pair of pants from somewhere.

“Hey, nice pants,” Clint says, going to join the rest of the group properly.

“Bruce, buddy, remind me later, we need to work on scaleable pants,” Tony says. “I’m going to end up revolutionizing the whole fashion industry.”

“All in a day’s work, huh?” Natasha asks dryly.

The whole scuffed-up group of them pile into a car Tony calls for them, and it honestly takes Clint a few moments to realize Steve and Bucky aren’t with them.

He almost asks if anyone knows where they are, but he’s happier not knowing.

-

The next day, entirely too early in the morning, Tony calls Clint and asks him to swing by the tower, if it’s not a problem. Clint sort of wants to say it is, but then Tony tells him it’s official Avengers business, and Clint’s not one to turn that down. He needs to keep his job.

The first thing Tony asks is, “Coffee? You look like shit.”

“You were out as late as I was,” Clint says.

“I didn’t go to sleep.” Tony makes a dismissive gesture, and puts a cup of coffee down in front of Clint. “And I’ve had enough caffeine to kill a Hulk. I’m plenty awake. And the others should be here … JARVIS, do we have an ETA?”

“Mr Rogers says he’ll arrive within ten minutes, Sir. He’s encountered heavy traffic.” JARVIS always, always catches Clint a little off guard. “Agent Romanoff should be here in a similar frame of time. Dr Banner is in the elevator as we speak, and should be arriving - now.”

“Morning,” Bruce says, shuffling off the elevator looking at least as tired as Clint. “What’s this about?”

“Oh, just a little chat, you know,” Tony says. “JARVIS, where’s the catering?”

The fact that Clint, of all the team, got there first worries him a little. He’s not usually great at being responsible and this feels like slipping. Captain America got here after him. Bucky’s later, too, but that’s because Bucky shows up with Cap, which is fine. They were stuck in the same traffic.

The catering Tony mentioned turns out to be bagels, which is lucky since Clint didn’t eat earlier. Bucky waves at Clint from across the table before grabbing a bagel for himself. “Morning.”

“Stark,” Natasha nods. “What’s this about?”

“Look, I’ll get right down to it -”

“For once,” Bruce says.

“Yes, for once, thank you, Dr Banner, very helpful,” Tony says. “I’ll get right down to it again, unless we’ve got any more suggestions? Anybody? Okay. We’re all Americans here - except Miss Romanoff, you don’t have to say it - the point is, we all know about Steve’s very special friend -”

Steve interrupts with an unamused, “What.”

“And I just felt like I should point out that, for the past year, I’ve been helping bankroll a search for Bucky, here,” Tony says. “Which is very familiar territory for my family, that’s great, love feeling like I’m following in Dad’s footsteps considering how he turned out. Anyway. What I did not know was that for the past three months or so? And I’m not really clear on if it’s only been three months or if I’m still being lied to - I’ve also been paying him. Bucky. He’s been working for me, and no one thought it would be a good idea to tell me.”

“You didn’t have to bring all of us for this,” Clint says. Notably absent is Agent Preston, who’s part of his team but not an Avenger; if he’d known what this meeting was - well, he’d have brought his team and pointed out it wasn’t Avengers business initially. She deserves a say in this, if the team’s motives are under attack.

“Shh, Barton, I’m lecturing you, too. Next time we’ve got an overlap like that -”

“Tony,” Natasha says. “What would you have thought if we’d called off the search, exactly?”

“Either you found Barnes or killed him - well, you’d have had to have found him before you could kill him, but those are the two main options there, really. You found him, dead or alive. See, you not telling me, I get,” Tony says. Bruce laughs into his hand, until Tony gives him a look. “Point is, stuff like that, we really need to organize it better. Barnes, did you know we were still looking for you?”

Bucky looks down at the table. Clint does not reach for his hand, or nudge his foot under the table. Clint keeps still because there’s no reassurance he can offer in front of everyone.

“I’m going to take that as a yes,” Tony says. “Which is just great. How did no one tell me about this?”

“There are six people, on the planet earth, who knew for sure where Barnes was at any given time,” Natasha says. “And one of them is Barnes himself.”

“There were a few times I didn’t know where we were until after the mission,” Bucky says. “If that helps my case here any.”

“Wait,” Steve says. “You were working for SHIELD the whole time.”

“Not the whole time,” Bucky says. “Needed time to get my head on straight.”

“But - how long did you say, Tony? Three months?”

Tony nods. “Three. Approximately. Like I said? It’s not really clear.”

“Why is this a meeting, again?” Bruce says. “He didn’t want to be found. I can respect that.”

“First of all - you know what, I’m not getting into that,” Tony says. “I’m letting that one go. Guy wants to hide out for a while, sure. I just want to know how no one told me.”

“I asked them not to,” Bucky says, chin up and slightly defiant.

“And not even Barton slipped? No offense, Clint, but you’re not great at secrets. What, did you just forget to tell me?”

“You know Agent Barton’s actually good at his job, right?” Bucky says, staring Tony down.

“Spies.” Tony shakes his head. “No more spy stuff. We’re a team.”

“Not everyone on a team needs to know everything all the time,” Bucky says. “What if psi-ops gets their hands on you and you end up giving away everyone’s objective?”

“If - what.”

“Delegating,” Bucky tries. “You know. Different people, different jobs? Not everyone -”

“No, no, go back to the psi-ops.” Even Tony’s hand gestures are incredulous. “SHIELD psi-ops, or Hydra?”

Bucky hesitates, looking toward the others. No one steps in, so finally, he tries, “Yes?”

“What,” Tony asks slowly, “are psi-ops, exactly?”

“Psychics.” Bucky shrugs, frowning a little. “Like I said, Hydra has ‘em. SHIELD’s still got a few.”

“I’m paying for psychics, now?” Tony looks despairing. “JARVIS, how long have I been bankrolling psychics without knowing it?”

“I can’t access that information, sir,” JARVIS answers, placid as ever.

“See?” Bucky says.

“No, no, I don’t like this at all,” Tony says.

Steve looks - unwell. He seems torn between staring at Bucky and at the half-eaten bagel on his plate, when looking at Bucky gets to be a bit much. “Three months, huh.”

Bucky’s mouth twitches. “Later.”

Steve smooths out his napkin on the table, then reaches for his ear and his pocket before realizing there’s nothing behind or in either to draw with and aborting the motion. “Okay. Sorry, Buck.”

“Barton, Romanoff and Preston were just doing what I asked,” Bucky says. “Just so - everyone’s clear.”

“Had your orders, huh.” Steve looks between the part of Clint’s team that’s actually present.

“Yes,” Natasha says. She doesn’t sound proud of the fact.

“It wasn’t just orders,” Clint says. “Bucky didn’t want anyone else to know, we didn’t let anyone else know.”

“Well, here he is,” Tony says. “Bucky Barnes. The Winter Soldier, everybody.”

Steve half-rises in his seat, expression cold and angry. “He’s not the -”

“Yes, I am,” Bucky says. He’s been very still for most of this conversation, and remains so, except for his fingers tightening slightly where they’re resting on the table and the quiet whine his arm sometimes does when executing precise motions.

“And that’s a conversation for the two of you,” Bruce says. He stands, pushing his seat back. “I don’t think this meeting was a good idea.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Tony says. “Who here doesn’t have regrets? Anyone? No? Great, so we’re all on the same page. I’m just saying, next time we’ve got two halves of the team working completely at odds with each other, and only one half of us knows it, maybe we try telling each other so half of us aren’t wasting our time.”

“Secrets come with the territory,” Natasha says. “If you don’t want us on the team -”

“No, no, god, that’s not it,” Tony says. “There’d be three of us left. What kind of team only has three people? No. I just have some bad experiences with the right hand not knowing what the left is doing, that kind of thing? Right, just so we’re on the same page.”

From there, the meeting changes track entirely, to discussion of just what they’re going to do next time Doom tries to hijack a meeting at the UN or Namor fucks with the World Security Council or Hydra does something Hydra-y. Those conversations are a lot less accusatory, at least.

Bucky keeps glancing toward Clint, smiling gratefully. Clint, at one point, gives him a thumbs up.

Steve spends most of the meeting either doodling - having finally obtained a pen from somewhere - or watching Bucky curiously.

The politics talk loses Clint, so he pretends to pay attention while mentally running through ideas for really cool trick shots to try and pull off. He could do to improve his aim from moving vehicles. Maybe he’ll have Tony help whip something up, later, if Tony’s still talking to him and doesn’t kick him off the Avengers.

The mood seems to have shifted enough that Clint doubts he’ll get kicked off. It’s a worry that always hovers at the back of his mind, though. America’s sixth favorite Avenger is also America’s most expendable Avenger, after all.

If Bucky gets official Avengers status, Clint might drop down to seventh place. He’s not sure yet how that’ll be counted. The Winter Soldier’s pretty unpopular, conceptually, but most of the public probably won’t make the connection.

Maybe. They just need to present Bucky right, get him a new costume. Clint’ll have to ask Maria about getting him some new duds later. Technically he should probably ask Bucky first about any potential costume changes. Clint doesn’t want to bug him outside of missions anymore, though, not now that Bucky’s back talking to Steve and doesn’t need him anymore.

Clint won't lie to himself. He's good at his job. SHIELD values him well enough, and he _is_ the best damn shot in the world. He's a decent pilot; the list of things he's at least _okay_ at is long. None of that changes the fact that he's terrible at relationships, especially when it comes to getting people to stick around. Two divorces are proof enough of that. He just thought that this time, since it wasn't even a relationship, he wouldn't feel so shitty about coming in second place.

Good as Clint is at his job, he's no Captain America. That's not something he'll ever be able to compete with. He just has to figure out how to be okay with that. He likes Bucky a lot, is all. Giving up on that sucks.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> we're almost at the end! next chapter's gonna be a real long one, i reckon.
> 
> i am on tumblr @ asofterbucky.

Clint’s team go on a mission the next day, over in Jersey. A tip from an informant led them to an old warehouse where AIM and Hydra are exchanging what’s supposed to be an important artifact.

Both groups only send a few emissaries, and there’s no artifact - it doesn’t take anything but the sight of Bucky’s metal arm for one of the captive survivors to start blubbering.

“There wasn’t a device in the first place,” he says, shivering. “You’re not gonna hurt us, right? I swear, we were just trying to trick ‘em -”

“Shut up,” their other captive says. Both of them are AIM. No one from Hydra is conscious. “We’re not telling you anything.”

“He just told us what we needed to know,” Natasha points out. “Unless we’re missing something.”

“Th-there’s. We just wanted to - we were gonna give ‘em a box that doesn’t do anything. With a tracker in it. It looks fancy,” the first guy says, voice wavery.

“Oh, my god,” the second one says. “Fuck, man, really? You serious?”

“That’s the Winter Soldier!”

“I know it’s the goddamn Winter Soldier,” the second says. “Wait, wait, the - okay, look, he’s right. The device is a decoy. We wanted to find Hydra’s nearest hideout and raid them later.”

“You guys are fighting,” Clint says.

“Sure,” the first one says. “Sure, and we can help - you’re after ‘em, right? You’re -” He looks at the badgeless uniforms, at Bucky. “Who are you?”

Clint could admit to being SHIELD, or he could question the fact that neither AIM agent apparently recognizes him as an Avenger. Instead, he says, “You know it’s not your turn for questions right now, right?”

“Sorry, boss,” the first one says.

Over the comm, Preston says, “Do you want to just bring them in, let someone else do the questioning?”

“Y’know what? Sure,” Clint says. “Looks like you guys are getting a free ride back to the city.”

-

Part of Clint fills up with a fluttery, tenuous hope when Bucky, as they’re headed back into New York, corners him to ask, “You wanna get lunch someplace?”

“Yeah, okay,” he says. Either it’ll be fine, normal, or Bucky’ll properly cut things off. Clint’s fine with either. Knowing it’s done’ll be better than assuming it is.

They take the train down to SoHo and end up eating in Little Italy, instead. Bucky spends the whole trip talking about how weird it is to sit in on a meeting about yourself, which Clint really can’t argue with.

It’s not until they sit down for lunch that Bucky starts talking about Steve. He starts talking, and keeps talking, and doesn’t stop.

“I just,” Bucky says. “I thought for the longest time I wouldn’t ever be able to face him. It’s still weird. Guy’s too nice for his own good. You almost kill him like, three times, and he still forgives you.”

“Think that’s just you,” Clint says. “I only tried to kill him once.”

“What?”

“Well, not him specifically,” Clint says. “The Avengers as a group.”

Bucky is quiet.

Clint taps at the side of his head. “Mind control.”

Bucky’s quiet confusion turns to anger, then. “If you’re kidding, it’s not funny -”

“I’m not,” Clint says quickly, hands up, palms out. “I swear I’m not.”

“Huh.”

Clint glances around furtively. He hates this topic and it’s his own damn fault for bringing it up. “It was - you heard about Loki, right? Someone has to have told you.”

“Yeah. I didn’t know …”

Clint shrugs. “He got inside my head. Made me do some things. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Clint -”

“I’m serious,” Clint says. “You know how many years I’ve managed not to talk about it? Like three. You’re not breaking that streak now.”

“If you ever want to, though,” Bucky says. He shakes his head. “You’re not gonna take me up on that. You ain’t gotta keep it to yourself, though. At least I know what it’s like, right? Fuck. You know what it’s like.”

Clint swallows hard. “It was only three days. Look. We’re not talking about it. You were saying about Steve.”

“Just didn’t think I’d be forgiven, is all,” Bucky says after a long moment. “Didn’t think I’d forgive myself. But I have to live with it, what they made me do. Have to keep trying to make up for it. And it’s - it wasn’t ever gonna be enough. You know what that’s like, yeah? I guess I just wanted to say thank you.”

“You’re welcome?”

“You kept pushing me,” Bucky says. “S’what I needed.”

Clint nods to himself. That’s it, then; last time they slept together was the last hurrah. He tells himself that knowing he can move on is better than hoping, but it’s still miserable.

“Sorry, I’m no good at this stuff.” Bucky laughs, scratching at the back of his neck. “Not anymore, anyway. Used to be better at it, I guess. It’s weird, trying to figure out who I am these days. But it’s nice. It’s been - I’ve really liked - y’know.”

“Sure,” Clint says.

“Thanks,” Bucky says again, and leans across the table to kiss him before settling back down in his seat. He looks happy. “God, just - havin’ my best friend back, you know? I still don’t know if I deserve it, but I’m gonna just. Fake it ‘till I make it? That what they say?”

“Yeah, that’s what they say.”

Bucky’s smile falters a little. “Hey. You okay?”

“I’m all right. I just gotta.” He makes a show of pulling out his phone, which chooses that exact moment to go off with a message from Maria. “Huh. I gotta go talk to Maria, I guess.”

“What about?”

Clint shows Bucky his phone; the message has no details to speak of. “No idea.”

“Well. She’d have sent me something too if I was invited. Good luck.”

“Maybe she finally realized she shoulda picked a better leader for the team -”

“Hey,” Bucky says, putting a hand on Clint’s before Clint can stand to go. “Hey, you’re a great leader. What I said earlier? I meant it. You’re good at your job.”

“Never said I wasn’t good at my actual job. Leading’s not my job. I don’t know what I’m doing half the time.”

“You’re fine,” Bucky says. “Now go, go. I’ll see you later?”

“Right,” Clint says. “There’s bound to be a mission sooner or later.”

-

There is a mission, down in New Orleans the next week. Hydra have been moving equipment down the river and into New Orleans for nearly a month, but haven’t made moves to take it any further away yet.

According to rumor, that’s about to change, and Maria wants them to intervene now. Several of Hydra’s remaining high-level operatives are involved.

“We have to take ‘em alive,” Clint reminds his team as they get ready to make the jump from the plane. It’s three AM and they’re running dark. While the others doublecheck their parachutes, Clint makes sure there’s nothing obviously and immediately wrong with the skycycle. “No casualties. We don’t get our targets, we fail.”

“Got it.” Bucky gives a lazy salute. He’s been distracted all evening.

“Hey. You up for this?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

Clint shrugs, though Bucky isn’t looking to see the gesture. “Just stay focused. Natasha, you all right?”

“Uh-huh.” She sounds amused.

“Then soon as Preston says the word, it’s go time. There’s a SHIELD team six blocks away; soon as we’re done, we call them and they’ll transport the prisoners for us.”

“We know,” Natasha says.

“We’re in location,” Preston says. “You kids have fun.”

Natasha and Bucky are fine at ground level; they jump first. After they’ve hit the ground, Clint gets to ride his damn skycycle right off the plane and land it on the roof. He could have parachuted too, technically, but he wants to be a little more precise with landing in the exact right spot. There’s risk involved, but the whole mission is a risk.

No alarms sound when he lands. He throws a tarp over the skycycle to make it a little less obvious, then makes his way across the roof to the air conditioner. This time of year, it isn’t running, and it’s his best in to the vents.

Most buildings, the vents aren’t strong enough to support human weight for all that long; that, or they’re too small. He just needs to get in and get access to the interior. The heavy steel-bolted door won’t offer that.

Ten minutes after he’s in, Natasha checks in - “I’m in.”

Clint’s inside, making his way through the building. He’s had to tranquilize two flunkies; they don’t look like any of the three targets the team is after, but he has his orders not to kill. These people, like the folks working at the docks in Madripoor, might not know what really goes on here. He reminds himself of that.

“In,” Bucky finally says over the comm, quite some time later.

Clint doesn’t make fun of him for taking so long, though he’s tempted to. Maybe if they hadn’t just - called it off, or whatever. Not broken up. He can work with Bucky fine. It just feels like joking around too much would be crossing some sort of line.

Clint keeps quiet and searches the building, and actually finds one of their targets, sitting there tapping away at a computer in one of the many offices on the second floor. Clint kicks the door open and has the man tranquilized before he can even cry out.

“Got one,” Clint’s happy to report.

“Found some of what they’re transporting,” Natasha says. “There’s a lot of machinery. And a lot of - going by the labels, this is the same drug they were producing overseas.”

“Y’know what? Destroy the drugs,” Clint decides, on the spot. SHIELD’s got enough of the stuff by now, and if they can’t kill anyone or destroy the building they can at least do that much. Keep that shit out of Hydra’s hands.

No one’s told him what the drugs are for, and he’s a little paranoid still. He trusts Maria, trusts his team. He just doesn’t want to find out someone else, somewhere else in the organization, still has evil designs. This is Clint’s team. He gets to call the shots, at least to an extent, so he’s going to.

The building’s so quiet at night. Clint wonders what it’s like during the day; if it’s lousy with Hydra, their seemingly-endless supply of followers. He doesn’t like this quiet.

“Just engaged with the enemy,” Natasha reports a short while later. “Five of them. None were our guys, though. They’re out cold, tied up. Ground floor, east end of the building. I have them in room … 103, it looks like.”

“Nice work,” Clint says.

Bucky hasn’t checked in, but Bucky’s always quiet on missions. Clint puts it out of his mind.

The lights come on suddenly, all over the building. Instead of the dim glow of exit signs, computer monitors and the occasional dim night light, every bulb bursts on at once. Clint shields his eyes for a moment, reacclimating.

“Guys? Report,” he says.

“Everything’s fine up here,” Agent Preston reports in. “We haven’t seen anyone leave, at least not by ground. There’s people keeping track of the sewers and they haven’t made a peep either.”

“Got it,” Clint says.

“The lights come on where you are?” Natasha asks. “All clear down here, by the way. I destroyed what you told me to. Moving on.”

“Mmhm.” Clint waits a moment. Maybe Bucky’s someplace he can’t answer for fear of getting caught. Still - “Agent Barnes?”

Nothing.

It’s fine, Clint tells himself. He finds the main floor of the warehouse, and climbs a ladder up to the metal catwalks that crisscross the area, overlooking the crates, boxes and barrels below. He listens.

“We’ve got two left,” Clint says. “Soon as we find them, we get out of here.”

“Got it,” Natasha says.

“SHIELD’s ready and waiting,” Agent Preston says.

The room where Clint finds Bucky looks like a meeting room - big, wooden table taking up most of it, chairs pushed up against the walls. There’s a projector hanging from the ceiling, little green light blinking on one side, facing a white wall.

Bucky has a gun to a man’s head. A woman lies dead on the floor, blood pooling under her.

“Don’t shoot,” Clint says. “That’s not the mission.”

Bucky doesn’t turn to look at him.

“The asset’s not - the override - it worked, but …” Bucky kicks the man before he can finish his sentence, sending him sprawling. With the lights on, Clint can tell easily that this is one of their targets. “I programmed it myself and he still killed Laura -”

“We need to take them alive, Buck,” Clint says. He has a tranquilizer dart ready. He doesn’t have the chance to use it. “Stand down. That’s an order.”

Finally, Bucky looks at him - the sort of look Clint might give a cockroach or a rock he just tripped over, bored and angry. There’s no recognition or comprehension there. With unhurried deliberation, he brings his gun to bear on Clint instead of the Hydra operative. “Don’t interfere.”

“Bucky,” Clint says. His eyes dart between Bucky’s face and the gun. He has his finger on the trigger already.

“You’re not … one of them,” the Winter Soldier says, brow furrowing. The Hydra agent makes a move to crawl away, but Bucky stomps on his ankle. He backs away from Clint and rests a heel against the Hydra agent’s throat, gun still trained on Clint.

“It’s Clint. I’m Clint.” He holds his hands up and tries to keep his voice calm and steady. “You know me, c’mon. We’re teammates.”

“Whatever mission you had him on, what you programmed,” the Hydra agent chokes out, trying to get out from under Bucky. One of his legs looks broken; he probably won’t get far, and Clint doesn’t blame him for not fighting harder. “He doesn’t remember, I overrode it, but it didn’t - he’s still not - you need to wipe him.”

Bucky’s face turns into a snarl at that, and he stomps down hard, heavy boot crushing the man’s throat with a sickly crack. The Winter Soldier doesn’t stop, either. He brings his foot down over and over before deciding to instead fall on top of the man and slam his metal fist into his face. The Hydra agent can’t still be alive, but Bucky doesn’t stop.

Clint takes the chance to run. It’s not a long-term solution, he knows, but at least he doesn’t hear Bucky following.

“Guys?” Clint says into his comm, heading back for where he left the first target he found and tranquilized earlier. “We’ve got a problem.”

“What is it?” Natasha asks.

“Wait.” Clint wants to ask her location, but Bucky’s still on their channel. Unless - he makes a call. He presses a button on his earpiece. “Preston? We alone?”

“Just you and me,” she says. “What’s wrong?”

“Can you cut Agent Barnes off from the comms?”

She doesn’t hesitate. “You got it. He gone rogue?”

“A little. Killed two of our three targets already.” Clint pauses. He’s nearly back to where he left the target he found, and feels a sudden surge of dread at what he might find. There’s no reason to think the target won’t still be alive. “At least one of them was involved in his - the - programming, I guess.”

“Oh, hell,” she says.

“We’re fucked,” Clint says. He taps at his ear again. He opens the door, and bites down on a curse. His target’s right where he left him, now sporting a bullet hole in his head. Clint’s willing to guess he’d be able to identify the ammunition if he could conduct an autopsy here and now. “Sorry about that, Tasha. What’s your location? Actually - just come to the third floor meeting room.”

“Got it,” she says. Within forty five seconds, she arrives. “What did you - oh.” She shuts the door behind her and looks at the body, then at Clint. “I’m guessing that wasn’t you.”

“Nope.”

“I don’t … think he’ll come after us,” Clint says, slow and uncertain. He looks down at the body of the man he’d purposely left alive. “He could’ve shot me, but he hesitated. Took longer than he had to to make up his mind.”

“We should get out of here,” Natasha says. “We’ll call the others.”

“Want me to do it?” Preston asks over the comm.

“I keep forgetting you’re listening.” Clint laughs, short and hollow. “No, not yet. Just give me a minute. Sorry I fucked this up so bad, Preston.”

“Not your fault,” she says. “I was listening. You did what you could.”

“It would’ve been nice if that was enough -”

Natasha puts a hand on his shoulder. “Barton. C’mon.”

-

Bucky is already at the rendezvous point when they get there. He’s sitting on an unmarked crate staring at his blood covered hands.

Clint looks at Natasha. Natasha shrugs. Bucky doesn’t seem to have spotted them yet.

“Preston, turn Bucky’s comm back on?”

“You got it.”

“Hey, Buck,” Clint says.

“Hey.”

“You back?”

“Yeah,” Bucky says. He doesn’t move or look around. He shifts his weight slightly, and his shoulders droop even further somehow.

“We missed you,” Natasha says dryly.

He holds his arms up above his head, hands crossed. “I surrender. Whatever you guys want to do.”

“What happened out there?” Natasha asks.

“I don’t - remember.” Bucky’s voice shakes on the last word. “I don’t remember. It was like everything since I woke up was just … an annoying dream. Didn’t know what I was doing there. Didn’t know my mission. I - killed some people, huh?”

“A few,” Natasha agrees.

“Sorry,” Bucky says. He bows his head, eyes closed. “You know something Steve told me once? You’re not - you’re not a weapon, long as you’re aiming yourself. Long as you got a choice, long as it’s you picking what to do, you can’t say anybody’s using you as a weapon. Don’t think anybody but me was using me, but …” Bucky makes a sound akin to a laugh. “You got two choices for a broken weapon. Melt it down or try and fix it.”

Clint swallows. “Preston?”

“Yes, Agent Barton?”

“Call in the SHIELD guys who were gonna transport our Nazi pals. Tell them - tell them we - tell them something, I don’t care. We’re bringing Bucky in. Get some restraints on him, whatever they wanna do.”

“You know if he wants to get out, he will,” Natasha says, low and off the comm.

“I don’t know what else to do,” Clint says. If there’s another option here, he can’t see it. He’s not going to kill Bucky, but this is too much to lie about or try to justify. He will go a long, long way for his friends. He’s risked his career and his own life over and over again. Bucky’s become one of his best friends; Clint trusts him. More accurately: Clint wants to trust him.

Right now, Clint’s not sure he does, and it’s through no fault of Bucky’s own.

It’s on Clint for not being able to reach him.

-

After the mission, Clint goes home and spends a full hour debating whether or not he wants to cook dinner. Having to make a decision paralyzes him.

He may be hungry, but he could just get takeout or throw a Hot Pocket in the microwave. Or eat a protein bar; he hasn’t broken into his stash in - months, probably. He got out of the habit of taking fully a third of his meals in bar form after Bucky’s insistence they eat actual food.

He goes down to the nearest market, buys whatever sounds good, then returns home with entirely too many groceries for one person to eat before it’ll go bad.

He cooks up most of what he bought in one marathon session, puts the pot and covered pan full of food on a wooden tray, then goes knocking at the door of one of his neighbors. She’s a nice lady; two kids. He watches them for her occasionally, when he’s around. If he’s got her schedule right, she should have gotten home maybe twenty minutes ago, and -

“Oh, Clint,” she says. The TV’s on in the background, and he can hear the kids shouting at whatever cartoon is airing. “You need something? I was just about to start dinner.”

“I, uh.” He holds out the tray, nodding his chin toward the covered cookware. “I made way too much food. I figured you might wanna - you know. Eat some of it.”

“Really?” She seems surprised, then smiles. “Thanks. That boyfriend of yours help you cook this? I haven’t seen him around in a while.”

“We aren’t … no,” Clint says.

“I’m fine with it.” She holds up her hands. “I accept it, you know. You don’t have to lie for the kids or anything.”

“No, it’s just - it’s not like that.” Clint shrugs. “It was - casual. Whatever. We’re done; he found somebody else.”

“Oh,” she says. The open sympathy on her face comforts Clint - at least someone besides himself feels bad for him. “Clint. I’m sorry. You want to come eat dinner with us?”

“Seriously? Yeah,” he says after a moment. “Yeah, that’d be nice.”

“I’ve got vodka,” she whispers, conspiratorially. “I can doctor some juice for you if you want.”

“Seriously?” Clint says. “You’re the best neighbor.”

“You just saved me an hour in the kitchen,” she says. “It’s the least I can do.”

Eating dinner with the neighbors at least gives Clint something to do with his night. He helps do the dishes, too - “Seriously, I’ve got so much free time today,” he says, when his neighbor insists he doesn’t have to help.

Eventually, he has to go home; it’s time for the kids to go to bed. Rather than watch TV or sleep, Clint heads up to the roof for some target practice. It’s a windy evening, so it takes a little more thought than usual to keep his arrows aimed true and not soaring off into the alley behind his building.

There’s a peace and a focus that come with target practice. When he’s practicing, he can focus himself entirely on his craft. No distractions. It’s him, the bow, and the target. He doesn’t have to watch out for anyone or try to dodge and fire at the same time unless he wants to.

He does practice running and shooting at the same time. Jogging back and forth for hours on end wears him out, but he can’t bring himself to attempt sleep. After a few hours, he does climb down the side of his building - using windows and bricks to hold onto - purely for the sake of practicing. It takes way too long and he falls from about ten feet up, but he gets up and dusts himself off, nothing broken thanks to landing on a recycling bin full of cardboard.

A coffee and a sandwich from the 24 hour joint near his apartment later, and he takes the stairs to go back up. The coffee keeps him up until sunrise, then he finally goes to sleep until a few hours later.

He’d sleep longer, only his phone rings, Boss Ass Bitch blaring at full volume. He can’t sleep through that. He fumbles for it, manages to pick up before it goes to voicemail, and says, “Maria?”

“Agent Barton, were you asleep?”

“Yes’m.”

“It’s noon.”

“Mmph,” Clint says. He sits up, rubbing at his eyes one-handed. “Yeah. What is it?”

“We need to have a meeting,” Maria says.

Clint’s still exhausted. He tries for a joke - “Can it wait until our next mission briefing?”

Maria hesitates, just for a moment. Clint’s almost never heard her hesitate. “Just come in when you get the chance, Agent Barton.”

That jolts Clint awake, at least. He rolls to his feet and pulls on a pair of pants. “I’ll be there as soon as traffic lets me get there.”

-

Maria doesn’t tell him to take a seat when he enters her office; she stands at the window with her back to him. “Agent Barton.”

“Commander Hill.”

“As of 1400 hours yesterday, your team is disbanded,” she says, bluntly. She turns to face him, finally. “I don’t know when or if I’ll use you - as a group, not you specifically - again.”

“Oh.” Clint rubs at the back of his neck. “Right, yeah, we kind of botched that one.”

“I do still want a full report from you.” She pauses - not in hesitation, but just to add gravitas, Clint’s pretty sure. “Don’t leave anything out. Don’t lie to protect any of your team. I’m usually lenient with you, I know, but we can’t afford it this time.”

“I won’t.” Clint shakes his head. “Can I leave out Agent Preston hitting me with a clipboard on the way back?”

The corner of Maria’s mouth twitches, then settles into a frown. “Agent Barton?”

“Yeah?”

“I know you like to turn everything into a joke, but now’s really not the time. You’re smarter than you let on. Look - what do you think happened?”

“Hydra got into his head somehow.” Clint taps at the side of his skull. “Dug their - claws, tentacles, whatever, right back in there, but it just … pissed him off. Think he wanted revenge. At least one of them had worked on him before.”

“Do you think he was intentionally defying orders?”

Clint pauses, swallowing around something thick in his throat. “I don’t think he knew he even had orders. Just that - he woke up on a Hydra base, saw somebody who’d hurt him and who couldn’t do anything to restrain him and did - what he had to, I guess.”

“That wasn’t what he was supposed to do.”

“No, ma’am,” Clint agrees. “I don’t blame him, though. If I ran into Loki, I’d try and do the same thing.”

“It’s not a matter of blame,” Maria says. “It’s a matter of doing the job we need, and doing it with as few complications as possible. Missions go south. I know that. But Barnes, as it stands, is a liability, and he’s one you weren’t fully prepared for. I’m sorry.”

“You’re - what?”

“I’m not in the habit of repeating myself, Agent Barton,” Maria says. “Look. You handled your team well, but this was beyond you. If we use Barnes again, we’ll take more precautions. We have a team … working with him right now.”

“Psi-ops?” Clint asks, lightly, a joke Maria’s bound not to get.

Maria’s frown deepens. “You don’t have clearance for me to even confirm or deny their existence.”

Clint opens his mouth to say something, then decides the better of it. Instead, he settles on: “So you’ll - call me if you need me?”

“You’re not getting burned, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Maria says. “You’re still on the payroll. We can still use you.”

SHIELD doesn’t have enough loyal agents these days to let him go to waste, is what she’s not saying. Clint knows that. It’s good enough. “You need anything else?”

“No. You’re dismissed.” She waves toward the door.

“Commander Hill,” Clint says, before he leaves. She nods for him to go on. “D’you think - should I tell Steve?”

“No,” she says. “I’m going to tell him, after you get that report in. I want it by the end of the day.”

“Right, okay,” Clint says. “You got it.”

-

The worst part of it is, the next time Clint sees Steve - a week and a half later, unavoidable - Steve doesn’t blame him. Whatever Maria told him about that mission gone wrong, Steve looks at him without any anger.

Neither of them says anything about Bucky. There’s a mission that needs doing, Avengers business, and then the team-minus-Bucky regroups at Stark Tower for a pizza.

No one asks. No one tells Clint how bad he fucked up.

No one points out that, if Steve had been there, he could have gotten through to Bucky and stopped all this from happening.

Clint still doesn’t know what they’re doing with Bucky. Probably they won’t kill him. He’s too useful a tool, a weapon to be aimed at problems.

When Bucky was around, he was quiet, stealth personified unless he wanted you to know he was there. Even the arm stayed quiet unless he was about to use it for something, and even then it was usually quiet enough to fade into the ambient noise of a room unless you knew what to listen for.

The quiet his absence leaves is different. Clint keeps half expecting he’ll be around someplace, imagines there’ll be another sniper up on the rooftops helping to cover the team, or for Bucky to wander into a room while the rest of the Avengers decompress post-mission.

He doesn’t. It’s weird.

He’s too selfish and too afraid of fucking up a friendship to ask Steve how he’s handling Bucky’s current absence.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello! it is the last chapter!
> 
> i am asofterbucky on tumblr; feel free to come say hello.

Three weeks on, Steve brings up the Bucky situation all on his own, without so much as a word from Clint. Clint would really rather not talk about it, but Steve's got him cornered, and like hell he's going to turn his back on Captain America when he's got something to say. Steve starts talking and Clint braces himself for it. “So Maria tells me Bucky’s going to be an official Avenger now.”

“That so?” Clint tries for good cheer. It’s just the two of them at the gym. Clint sits down on a bench to put his shoes back on after his shower. At least he's fully clothed otherwise. This conversation would be even more awkward if he weren't.

“What happened on that mission,” Steve says, slow like he's still thinking it over. He towels sweat off from his forehead and leans against the wall. “That wasn’t on you.”

“You coulda handled it,” Clint says. He rubs at his face. “An Avenger, huh.”

“An Avenger,” Steve repeats.

“That’s - good, I guess.” It means Clint and Bucky will be working together more, presumably, unless the group decides it’d be better to have Bucky around than fallible, all-too-human Clint. His skillset’s being edged out, slowly but surely. Natasha already covers a lot of what he brings to the team, in terms of experience and expertise; Bucky covers that and more, with aim almost - almost! - as good as Clint's own. He feels redundant, all of a sudden.

“You two’ll be on the same team again,” Steve says. There’s something probing about his voice, and Clint’s got no idea what kind of answer he’s fishing for.

“Am I getting kicked off the Avengers, too?” Clint asks. He can’t look at Steve, not now. He also can’t think why else Steve would bring it up. Steve’s not a cruel man. Occasionally petty, sure, but not needlessly cruel to his friends, unless he’s decided he hates Clint, which is possible but seems unlikely.

“What? No!” Steve puts his hands on Clint’s shoulders, leaning down so they're nearly eye to eye. “Clint. Agent Barton. Talk to me.”

Clint meets Steve's eyes, because he may be a lot of things but he's not a coward. “About what?”

“Why you think we’d kick you off.”

Clint shrugs. “I fucked up. And - the other bit doesn’t matter, I’m good at working with my exes. It doesn’t have to be weird.”

“Exes.”

Clint looks down, but Steve grabs his chin and forces him to meet his eyes. “C’mon, you had to know.”

“Buck told me,” Steve says, and Clint waits for a punch in the jaw that never comes. “He didn’t say anything about you guys breaking up.”

“We weren’t even really dating. S’fine, I get it,” Clint says. “You were there first. It’s fine.”

“I was what?” Steve asks, incredulous. His hands drop away and he takes a step back, allowing Clint his personal space again.

Clint’s mouth hangs open in disbelief before he musters up the ability to state the obvious. “You and Bucky?”

Steve stares at him. “You thought Bucky and I were - together. Like that.”

“Yes?” Clint pauses. “C’mon. Steve and Bucky. It’s a whole thing. You’re a whole thing!”

“He’s my best friend,” Steve says. “I hate to say just my best friend. But that’s what it is. Just because he’s the most important person in my life doesn’t mean me and him were ever … it was never like that.”

Clint's shoulders slump, surprise overtaking any other reaction. “Oh.”

“Oh,” Steve echoes, slightly mocking. “Did you ever think to ask him? Or me, for that matter?”

“He seemed busy,” Clint says, though his heart isn't quite in defending his own baseless assumptions. “When he finally started talking to you again. Ah, fuck. Of course he was. Shit.”

“SHIELD’s gonna be done with him tomorrow,” Steve says. “I was going to go meet him. Now you’re coming with me.”

“I can’t -”

“Yes, you can,” Steve says. “You should be there. When he gets out. If you still - he’s important to you, right? You like him?”

“Sure.” Clint looks down so he can finish tying his shoes, then rises, finally, from the bench. He paces a few steps, crossing his arms.

“Then we’re both going.”

Clint says, “So what’s SHIELD even doing with him?”

“Classified.” Steve’s mouth quirks up into a wry, apologetic smile. “They want to make sure what happened on your last mission doesn’t happen again.”

“And you trust them?”

“Hardly.” Steve’s smile doesn’t get any more cheerful. “But what else can I do? He wants to keep working in the field. It’s either this or he goes off on his own again.”

Clint would go with him. That’s his first thought - that if Bucky decided to go solo and run off on his own, Clint would absolutely follow him anywhere, do whatever he could to help. Not that Bucky would want him along; Clint wasn’t able to help last time Hydra messed with his head, and there’s no reason to think he’ll be able to help if it happens again. At least this way, it won’t be a concern.

“Still surprised you’re keeping me on with Bucky on the team,” Clint says. “Now you’ve got two spies and two snipers. Three spies, technically.”

“You really call yourself a spy?”

“SHIELD operative, spy.” Clint shrugs. “Spy sounds cooler.”

Steve gives him another of those sad, knowing little smiles, the kind that implies a certain level of familiarity with feeling worthless and redundant. Clint forgets a lot of the time that Steve wasn’t always Captain America. Captain America’s been a thing since before Clint was even born, been dead - sort of - longer than Clint’s been alive. And still, for most of Steve’s life, he wasn’t Captain America.

Steve says, “You know why we need you on the team, Clint?”

“At this point, I’m guessing it’s the jokes and my dashing good looks,” Clint says. He runs a hand through his hair, faux-prideful.

“How long have you worked for SHIELD?”

“What? Maybe - ten years,” Clint says. “Around there. Had a few years of training before that, too.”

“And you’ve been doing archery how long?”

“Aw, no, don’t make me figure that out. At least twice as long. Shit. I was a kid. Twenty-some years, I guess. Don’t make me get more specific than that.”

“You’ve got as much field experience as any of us. More than most,” Steve says. “I mean, look at me. I lost a lot of time. Everybody looks at me like I’ve been … I don’t know. I was only in the war for four years, and I haven’t been around for that much longer now.”

“It’s almost ten.”

“Almost,” Steve says. “Point is, you were there at the Battle of New York. You’ve been there for - honestly, I’m not even sure what else you’ve done, and I think that’s the point.”

“You could have read my file,” Clint says. “Secret missions are only secret if you don’t have clearance, and that sort of went out the window when the files got dumped.”

“There anything in those files of yours I need to know about?”

“No.”

“Then there we go.”

“Huh.” Clint shakes his head. “Well - thanks, bro. Good to know my secret agent work’s still secret.”

“Look, Clint, unless you run off and join Hydra, you’re on the team.” Steve pauses. “Unless you want to quit, but I don’t think you do.”

“I don’t.”

“Then we’re keeping you. Just because you’re not someone’s pet science project doesn’t mean you’re not valuable. You had to work to be what you are.”

Clint doesn’t mean to smile, but he can’t help it. It’s hard not to believe it when Captain America says something nice about you.

-

It’s nearly spring. The sky’s mostly clear and free of smog, the sun shining brightly through the light cloud cover.

Clint brings an extra jacket with him, just in case, slung over his shoulder. Across the street, an old woman’s emptying a bag full of breadcrumbs for a veritable mob of pigeons.

“Afraid it’s going to get colder?” Steve asks, sitting down next to him on the steps.

“I wasn’t sure if Bucky had a jacket with him,” Clint says, honest because he can’t think of a good joke to make. “Or if they’d give him one, you know?”

“Pretty sure they wouldn’t kick him out onto the streets to freeze.”

“He wouldn’t freeze,” Clint says. “He didn’t the first time, so I don’t think March in New York is gonna do it.”

Steve gives him a look.

“Bucky would’ve laughed at that.” Clint holds up the hand that isn’t holding onto the jacket, a half-assed gesture of harmlessness. “You know he would have. Don’t look at me like that.”

Steve almost laughs at that, sort of. It looks like he might, at least. “You’re probably right.”

“You know, this is already nicer than the time I went and saw my ex after she got out of jail,” Clint says. “Man, that was weird. Hadn’t seen her in years.”

“And Bucky wasn’t in jail.”

“Sure, sure,” Clint says. “Close enough.”

Steve stares across the street into the park.

Clint keeps looking over his shoulder to watch the doors. There wasn’t a better place to sit close to the entrances where he could actually face the doors without being weird. Even with proper ID, he doesn’t want to spook any rookie SHIELD agents too badly.

He doesn’t actually know if they have rookies right now, or if any of them would be here instead of at the academy. Clint may just be making excuses for the fact that he chose an exceedingly shitty vantage point, when picking good ones is literally part of his job.

At 10:32 AM on a Wednesday afternoon in March, Bucky Barnes exits the building he’s spent most of the past three weeks inside. Clint spots him, and turns to grin at Steve - “Told you so.”

Bucky isn’t wearing a jacket. He does have a sweatshirt on - standard SHIELD issue black with no logo, nothing fancy. It's the kind of thing you wear when you're just off a mission, all your clothes are trashed, and you can't have anyone knowing you work for a secret government agency while you're on the way home from HQ. Clint's got about a dozen of those sweatshirts back home. He's pretty sure Bucky's borrowed a few from him before, too, but this one's brand new, the fabric crisp and unwrinkled. Both Bucky's hands are tucked into the pocket on the front.

“Bucky!” Steve raises an arm to wave at Bucky, who’s looked distracted since exiting. He’s partway down the steps and not too far off when Steve catches his attention.

“Oh, hey, Steve - Clint?” On noticing Clint, something between surprise and delight flashes across Bucky's face before settling back into pleasant neutraility. At least he doesn't look angry. 

“Brought you a jacket,” Clint says, tossing it at Bucky. Bucky’s got quick reflexes, and gets his hands out of his pockets in time to catch it. “Although I guess if you don’t need it then, you know, you can give it back.”

Bucky shrugs it on casually. He looks between Steve and Clint. “I didn’t know you guys were coming.”

“I guess I could have phoned ahead or something,” Clint says. “I can go -”

“Oh,” Bucky says, mouth slanting sideways into something he probably intends as a smile. “Sure, yeah. If you’re busy.”

Steve presses his fingers against his eyelids. “Clint, you’re not busy.”

“I could be!”

“You’re coming to lunch,” Steve says. He crosses his arms, stern and militaristic, voice shifting into the register he uses when he’s giving orders. “We’re all getting lunch and it’s gonna be nice.”

“Okay.” Clint holds his hands up. “Okay. Got it. Lunch. Nice. Sure.”

-

“You’re getting chili,” Bucky says, as soon as the waitress walks away. “We go to a place that literally has burger in the name and you want the chili?”

“It’s a quest,” Clint says. He looks toward the kitchen for a moment, then, rather than look at Bucky again, and smooths out the checkered vinyl tablecloth. “Maybe it’ll be good.”

“It’s gonna be bullshit.” Bucky leans back, staring Clint down across the table. “You’re a goddamn idiot.”

Clint leans back in his own seat, putting his arms behind his head. “For getting what I want for lunch?”

“Sure, that,” Bucky says, rolling his eyes. “Among other things.”

“Buck, leave him alone.” Steve sighs. He’s been sighing a lot, pretty much since they sat down at the corner booth they’re currently occupying.

Bucky picks up the butter knife set in with the rest of his cutlery and starts spinning it between his metal fingers.

“Stop.” Steve looks uncomfortable and frustrated at once, his hands folded in his lap and mouth in a sudden frown.

“Fine, fine. I wasn’t hurtin’ nothin’, Rogers, just -”

“Bucky.”

“Okay.” Bucky puts the knife down. “Fine, fine. I’m just hungry. I’m bored and I’m hungry. Dangerous way to be.”

“You wanna punch it out later?” Clint asks. “We can punch it out.”

“I’m not gonna punch you,” Bucky says. “I’d break your damn nose. You don’t need that.”

“Been broken before.” Clint shrugs. “And I was figuring I’d get to punch you too. Sparring, boxing, whatever. An equivalent exchange of punches.”

Bucky opens his mouth, lifting his hand up. He closes his mouth. His hand drops back down to the table. Finally, he comes up with, “The fuck are you talking about?”

Clint can't avoid smiling. “Hell if I know.”

Bucky laughs, almost reluctantly. “Yeah, yeah. Fine. Look, I wasn’t gonna - I was just gonna ask Rogers. But I’ll ask you, too.”

Clint sits up straighter in his seat. “What’s up?”

“So SHIELD’s got psychics,” Bucky says, eyes darting around the restaurant. He keeps his voice low; Clint's always liked how Bucky sounds when he's telling secrets, not that he'd tell anyone that. “I didn’t tell you that, by the way.”

Clint does not hesitate in answering. “Sure, no, I knew that. Totally knew it.”

“Uh-huh. Look, Hydra’s trying to make their own,” Bucky says. “But they’re not real big on letting their psychics have personal autonomy. ‘Course not. That’s not Hydra’s thing. It’s better keepin’ a horse in the stable than letting it run around in the fields whenever it wants, but if you can’t do that - you might as well put tag ‘em so you can find ‘em later, right?”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Bucky says sheepishly. His expression remains unmoved, but the flush of color in his cheeks betrays him. Clint couldn't follow that analogy and apparently neither could Bucky. “Point is, we’ve got one last nest of vipers to flush out and destroy.”

“I take it this isn’t official SHIELD business?” Steve asks, dryly.

“They don’t need me for a while,” Bucky says. He leans back in his seat, arms folded behind his head. He closes his eyes. “I’m on leave. Free to do as I please, long as I don’t get myself in trouble.”

“That’s awfully kind of them.” Steve looks the happiest he has all day. There’s a pause in the conversation as their food finally arrives. Bucky tucks in hungrily.

“What a nice coincidence.” Clint picks up his mug of coffee and breathes in deep. The smell wakes him up. “They told me to use my vacation days for the year, too.”

“Either they planned it that way or they didn’t,” Bucky says around a mouthful of hamburger. “And I’m not sure I care which it is. You gonna run and tell them, be SHIELD’s little lap dog?”

“Fuck off.” Clint steals one of Steve’s fries, despite having his own. “You can put a damn wire on me to prove I’m not going to tattle on you, if you want. I’m with you on this one. I swear.”

“‘Till the end of the line?” Steve asks, sounding amused. He ducks when Bucky throws a fry at him.

Clint narrows his eyes. “What?”

“Nothing. You two are a lot alike,” Steve says. Steve shakes his head and Bucky doesn't look at him.

-

“Hey, Clint.” Natasha’s in his apartment, sitting on his couch and petting his dog. Lucky, the traitor, has his head on her leg, tail thumping lazily against the sofa cushions. “Where are you headed?”

“Connecticut.” Clint doesn’t bother denying that he’s leaving. He’s suited up in his uniform, SHIELD insignia covered over with a merit badge patch he found at the thrift store down the road. At least the badge is for archery. The fact that he’s got his bow in his case and is currently reorganizing his quiver gives him little room to lie.

Natasha scratches behind Lucky’s ears absentmindedly, grinning at Clint as he fumbles with a handful of arrows. “Really?”

“Uh-huh,” Clint says. He manages not to drop the exploding tipped arrows, at least. Things could be worse.

“Ooh, ooh, take me,” she says. Lucky, sensing her excitement, sits up and tries to lick her face. She pushes him away, laughing. “I love Connecticut at this time of year.”

“I’m not sure you’re invited,” Clint says. He has too many trick arrows. Choosing which to bring halts him in his tracks for several moments as he sorts through them. Nobody makes anti-psychic arrows, as far as he knows.

“I’m inviting myself.” Natasha pulls her phone out, tapping at it one-handed as she holds Lucky at arm’s length. Lucky keeps wagging his tail. “Your dog’s weird.”

“He likes you.” Clint sighs. Net arrows are probably good. A while back Tony gave him a goo arrow he still hasn’t found a use for. Half of these probably won’t come in handy, but he wants to be prepared. Besides, they’re already labeled. “Who are you texting? Are you inviting Preston?”

Natasha smiles with the same sort of deceptive sharpness Clint normally associates with knife grass - nice to look at, but it’ll slice you good if you’re not careful. There isn’t any malice in her expression but she’s no less dangerous. “How’d you guess?”

Working with a loyal team has its pitfalls. Namely, they’ll find a way to involve themselves even when maybe they shouldn’t. Still, Clint’s touched, and the only real opposition he can come up with is a weak,“Bucky’s gonna murder me.”

“You didn’t do anything,” Natasha reminds him cheerfully. “You didn’t know I would be here. You also don’t have a car.”

Clint makes a T with his arms. “Hold up, time out. Are we taking Preston’s car?”

“Were you going to ride in Steve’s sidecar, or what?” Natasha asks. “I don’t know what the plan was.”

There was no plan. Clint says the first thing he can think of: “I was thinking I’d borrow the skycycle.”

“Mm. No. Preston’s car it is. She has a minivan.” Natasha finishes typing her message just as Lucky gives up and curls up on the couch again, watching her with mournful brown eyes. Clint sympathizes with his dog, as usual. “We’ll all fit. With our gear, no less.”

-

“I don’t remember this being SHIELD business,” Bucky says, though he climbs into one of the middle seats anyway.

“It’s not,” Preston says. “SHIELD didn’t buy my minivan. Close your damn door.”

Bucky does so, then twists around in his seat and stares at the rest of them. “This is literally - this is the same team SHIELD assembled.”

“Plus me,” Steve says. He’s in the front seat, helping Preston with directions. Natasha insists they should use a paper map rather than the GPS; Clint’s pretty sure that’s overkill, but he’s not ready to argue over it either.

Bucky rolls his eyes, but he can’t keep the fondness out of his voice. “Plus Captain America here.”

“Did you honestly think we’d let you run off alone -” Natasha starts.

“I wasn’t running off alone. Me and Steve were gonna take care of it.” Bucky scowls at her.

“Uh-huh.”

Clint leans against the door, looking out the window at the road passing by. They’re only an hour and a half out from New York, and most of that trip was on I-95. Now they’re on back roads, and only have - hopefully - another thirty minutes until they reach the location. This is the longest roadtrip Clint’s ever been on, he’s pretty sure, and he used to be in the circus. His whole life was a roadtrip for a while. “I mean, this might be overkill.”

“Don’t,” Natasha says. “Don’t you dare. The second you say that, it’s going to turn out we’re not enough.”

“We can just call Iron Man or whatever,” Clint says. “It’ll be fine. Give Tony Stark a nice ego boost. He probably needs it.”

-

Having half the Avengers and a highly qualified SHIELD agent should, in theory, be enough. Adding in a deadly, ex-brainwashed assassin from the past should make this mission a walk in the park.

It is not a walk in the park. Hydra strike harder than Clint’s used to, speaking to a level of organization not seen since before they fell. Getting constantly undermined by the revived corpse of SHIELD must have hardened this cell’s resolve. On the road to the facility, a sniper barely missed Agent Preston, the bullet instead taking out the radio dial as she veered sharply right and off the road.

Any hope of sneaking into the facility went out the window around that point.

“I guess we’ll do this the hard way,” Captain America says, all stolid, steely resolve. Bucky’s out of the van before it’s even stopped.

Clint tells Preston, “I’ll get you a new radio. Hell, a new sound system.”

“Gee, thanks.” She unbuckles her seat belt, then, after a moment’s thought, pulls a gun from the glove compartment. She already has two with her. At Clint’s look, she shrugs. “This one’s lucky.”

Storming a fortified compound isn’t Clint’s favorite way to get around. He prefers sneaking in, or, better yet, not going in at all, and taking care of what needs doing from as far away as possible. That’s why he spends so much time at the range.

He gets punched six times, kicked twice, and has a bullet graze his left arm before he gets inside the building, and it doesn’t get much better once they’re in. At least they aren’t fighting aliens. Clint’s always happier fighting fellow humans. After New York, he spent a solid week wondering whether the Chitauri had families back home in space. After a drunken conversation with Nat about what Chitauri music would sound like, he pretty much stopped wondering about them much at all - but humans, they’re easy to understand. He’s one of them. He knows exactly what he’s dealing with.

They're people, and necessary as it is, Clint doesn't always like fighting people.

Things are going about as well as can be expected, for the first five minutes or so. Steve’s fantastic to watch in action. Natasha is as competent and beautiful as ever. Bucky’s barely-restrained brutality gets to Clint in ways he can’t bother thinking about until he’s in private. Even Agent Preston, who Clint hasn’t seen in the field before, pitches in - from a ways away, to be fair, with a pistol rather than any punching, but she nails a guy in the head right before the guy can shoot Clint, so he’s good with her doing whatever she wants.

So it goes well enough, right up until it doesn’t.

There’s a ringing in Clint’s ears.

He can’t remember what he’s doing here, exactly. Fighting Hydra with his team, plus Steve Rogers, and - what? Something. Trying to subdue as many Hydra members as possible. Figure out the real root of their scheme. Bucky half explained it, but Clint still isn’t sure exactly what they’re after.

The ringing in his ears drowns out all other sound.

-

Clint and Natasha are fighting side by side. Bucky saves Clint’s life. Clint stops a man from kicking Captain America in the spine. Agent Preston and Natasha track down a high-ranking Hydra official and try to interrogate him.

Clint is not with them for that.

“Look,” a Hydra agent says to him, sometime before all of that happens, and throws a vial full of white powder at him. Time slows down. Clint doesn’t mean to inhale but does.

There is a ringing in his ears that drowns out everything else.

-

Clint knows where everyone is. Someone else knows where Clint is.

Clint is not who the other person was looking for, but he’ll do, apparently. “No,” Clint says, to the air. He shoots the Hydra agent who threw the powder at him. He finds Natasha - who, unlike everyone else in the goddamn building, does not appear on the mental radar he’s suddenly developed. No ghostly impressions of intent/motion/past surround her, which is soothing in its own way.

There are so many people in this building. Too many, as far as Clint’s concerned. Most of them leave a greasy taste in his mouth.

“Clint.” Natasha shakes his shoulders. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine, I’m me,” Clint says, because that’s the first thing he thinks to reassure her of. No one’s taken him over, he’s just - off balance. He needs to pull himself together. He can do that. He’s pulled himself through worse than a sudden vague impression of hundreds of lives scattered throughout a building. “It’s like a video game. On the map. The little dots? Just like that. Got a HUD inside my brain.”

“Uh-huh,” Natasha says, worry evident on her face.

Clint shoots someone the instant they start to turn the corner. The person he shoots is a Hydra operative; that part’s obvious, but still crystal clear. Less obvious: they’re 33, unmarried, and raise tropical fish in their off time. They like techno. Their last thought before getting shot is of whether or not their toaster is still under warranty.

“Oh, I know what Hydra was doing,” Clint says. “Did they tell you what Hydra was doing?”

“No.”

Clint taps at the side of his head. “Making psychics.”

“Oh, great.” Natasha looks around, exasperation evident. “This is just great. Bucky and I should be fine. You and Steve and Preston, though -”

“I can find ‘em,” Clint says. “Their psychics. I see them.”

“Do you.”

Clint starts walking. “Yeah. Yeah.”

“Is this -”

“No, this’s my choice,” Clint says. It is. They know where he is. He knows where they are. They don’t want him where they are. That’s the impression he gets, at least. It could, ostensibly, be faked. He’s not very good at this, and he’s also pretty sure the drug’s got a limited amount of time before it wears off and he’s not accidentally psychic anymore.

Clint’s looking forward to that part. Hopefully it won’t kill him or make him explode or anything. Not a single one of the experiments or drugs he’s heard of that are purported to give superpowers have worked out well, not since way back when in Captain America’s day.

“I don’t think mind control’s a thing,” Clint continues. “Well, it is a thing, but it’s not part of this thing.”

Hydra can’t have perfected this yet. The ringing in Clint’s ears is terrible, and if he tries, he can hear the same sound by way of Hydra’s own psychics. That causes a weird feedback loop he’s not quite sure how to back out of. The awful tinnitus drowning out everything else reminds him of when he was a kid and fell out of a tree and couldn’t hear right for days after.

At least he’s had hearing trouble before. This sucks, but he can push on through. He keeps getting confused about where he is, with the jumble of thoughts - his own, the psychics’, everyone else in the building.

Natasha puts a hand on his back and steadies him, and that, at least, is something he can follow. He can’t what Natasha’s thinking at all. He focuses on her just for that.

“The other psychics,” Natasha says. “Are they in charge?”

“One of ‘em is,” Clint says. “The other’s a test subject. They know we know that now, by the way. That’s weird.”

“I know. I’m sorry.” Natasha pats his shoulder. “I’m going to get the others.”

“No, what? You gotta come with me.” Clint rubs at his face. “Tasha. Don’t leave me alone.”

Clint follows a familiar path through a building he’s never been in before. The process feels almost automatic. Same as walking from the front door to his apartment back in Bed Stuy, or from the entrance to Maria’s office at SHIELD’S old HQ. Like he does it every day. He goes past one of the labs, which he doesn’t have to look at to identify. He hasn’t been there before, either.

There’s a panic room. Of course there’s a panic room. Inside are two artificial psychics and a month’s worth of food and water.

“Investments,” Clint says, vaguely. Hydra wanted to keep their new developments safe, is possible, as long as they didn't end up dead. The two inside the room don't want to be dead. 

Clint thinks about wanting the password. He thinks very, very hard about how he doesn’t know the password and how bad it’d be if either of the psychics in there thought about it themselves. At the same time, he can hear what they're thinking, and he gives voice to the thought because he _has_ lost track of Steve and the rest. “Where’re the others?”

“Can’t you tell?”

“Oh, I was … Okay.” Clint pauses. He rubs at his temples. This is doing a number on his head. “Up on the first floor still, I guess. There’s less people than before. Same number of our people, don’t worry. But less Hydra people.”

“Great,” Natasha says. She’s trying to get the panic room open by way of the panel next to the door. He watches her hands move over the numbers on the keypad, barely aware of his own hand drifting toward the panel. “Do you have the code?”

Clint presses buttons blindly, without thinking about it. A wave of panic and anger hits him and he nearly falls down from it, even though there’s no physical force behind the emotions.

“I think they’ve been stealing information from me,” Clint says. “One of ‘em’s thinking about how dumb boomerang arrows sound.”

“Oh, well then,” Natasha says. Everything she says gives him a sense of deja vu. “Sounds like a capital offense to me.”

The door opens.

There are three people inside. One of them’s got a fancy metal helmet and goggles. The other two look panicked - and they’re the ones Clint’s got a handle on.

The other one doesn't show up on Clint's mental radar. Also, that last guy has a gun trained right at Clint's head. 

“This is going well,” Natasha says.

Clint starts to take a step back, freezing when the helmeted man's finger finds the trigger. “Look, the ringing in my ears sucks, but it's not that bad. I don’t wanna get shot.”

“Let me and my assistants go,” helmet-head says. He sounds vaguely European, but in a way Clint thinks is more for show than anything else. “And I won’t shoot you. Fair trade?”

“I fucking hate your jumpsuit.” Clint wants to sit down. He wants to sit down and hold a pillow over his head and not get up again. The bright red jumpsuit helmet-head’s got isn’t helping Clint’s opinion of him at all. “Is - Mentallo? You’re calling yourself Mentallo? Guy’s named Mentallo, Tasha. That’s so stupid.”

Mentallo edges forward, the other two following after him like puppets on strings. He shoves more information at Clint than just his name: sitting in a college dorm listening to Pink Floyd and smoking up. Watching the end credits for The World Is Not Enough in a theater that smells like stale popcorn and rat piss. The feeling of the hairs in his nose freezing as he surveys a Siberian forest in mid-January. Standing at the top of a tall, tall tower, looking down through a floor made of glass at the city below and feeling dizzy. Clint feels a dozen things at once.

The other two psychics don’t want to be there. Clint feels that filtering through the white noise Mentallo's pushing on him.

“Miss Romanova has stronger defenses than I anticipated,” Mentallo offers, almost apologetically, as he sidesteps past Clint and through the door. It's all Clint can do to stay on his feet and not just lie down and curl up in a ball on the floor. Even if he shut his eyes, that wouldn't stop him seeing. Everything is in his head.

Natasha’s not doing anything. Natasha should do something. Clint doesn’t know how to tell her that without saying something. He’s also having a hard time remembering how his limbs are supposed to work.

“Sorry,” one of the other psychics says. "Stop it; stop it." They don't know how to handle it, either. Small comfort, that. At least one of them didn't know what Hydra was when they signed up for the clinical trial. There was money offered. 

Clint’s face feels wet. He rubs the back of his hand against his nose and stares at the blood staining his skin uncomprehendingly.

Natasha is -

Natasha isn’t there. Natasha left before he even got to this room. He picks that up off one of the other psychics. This whole time Clint's been thinking she was there, and it's been his imagination. He felt better having her there. That it was all a hallucination explains her not doing anything, at least.

Clint’s beginning to see why Maria never had him deal with psychics before. This is the worst.

He readies an arrow. Closes one eye, because he doesn’t trust himself to aim properly with both open like usual. Lets the arrow fly.

It embeds itself in the wall three inches to the right of Mentallo’s head. Clint never misses. Clint can’t miss. Clint missed, and he can’t do that; if he misses, then there’s no reason for him to be on the Avengers, not when everyone else is -

“Now, now, we can settle this peacefully,” Mentallo says, his voice slithering through Clint’s thoughts, dripping down into his grey matter and making it even harder to focus. The overload of imagery let up but now Clint feels like he's moving in slow motion, instead.

“I can’t believe that’s your fucking name.”

Clint takes aim again, this time at - 

“Okay, shoot me.” Bucky stares at him. He looks unsurprised. “What’ll you tell Commander Hill?”

“You’re not him,” Clint says. He swallows hard, and tries to hold his breath so his hands won't shake. “You’re the guy. The stupid psychic helmet guy.”

“It’s not like I can say anything to prove I’m not,” Bucky says. “He could get in your head. Any memory only we’d have about us, he can get to. Your call, Clint. You've got a fifty-fifty chance of fucking this up, at best, but knowing you? I wouldn't trust those odds.”

Someone presses a gun to the back of Clint’s head. He’s pretty familiar with that sensation, as one of the perks of his job. He feels sick. Blood drips from his nose down the front of his shirt. He keeps the arrow trained on - Bucky, Mentallo, whoever.

“Duck,” Bucky’s voice says, in Russian this time. Clint doesn't know much Russian but he does know that much. A memory: Bucky telling him to duck once before, in a back alley in Madripoor; Clint trusting him already even though they’d barely met. He wants that kind of trust back. The person in front of him, that can't be Bucky. Bucky wouldn't say that to him.

He dives to one side instead of just ducking, and the image in front of him flickers, reality bleeding through the desaturated sidestep of memory. A shot goes off at about the same time as he looses his arrow. The arrow goes through his target’s shoulder. The bullet goes through his knee. Clint lands hard on the ground after his dive.

The vision of Bucky is gone. That was definitely Mentallo who got shot, which is nice. Sort of a relief. Rolling over onto his back, Clint decides not to get up again. He probably couldn’t if he wanted to, but pretending it’s a choice feels nice.

Bucky’s face comes into view.

“You real?”

“Probably,” Bucky says. He kneels down next to Clint, touches his face. “You don’t look so great.”

“Fuck off, I’m … very handsome,” Clint says.

“Yeah, you are.” The touch of metal fingers against his cheek is familiar, at least. Clint rolls his head to the side to press into that touch, which he’s missed the last few weeks. He thinks, absurdly, of his childhood, of pressing his cheek against the chains of a swingset, sitting on the playground well after dark because he didn’t want to go back to a foster home, wanting to spend time with -

“Hey, sorry to interrupt your moment, but we need to get him out of here,” Natasha says impatiently, though not to Clint. She's always looking out for him. He should get her - some flowers, a cool knife, maybe a gift card. Some kind of gift. He can't think of a good one. His head hurts so bad. “Pick him up and let's go."

Clint closes his eyes. Everything hurts. He still can’t tell if she’s really there. “Oh, Nat. You were gone.”

“I went to get help.” Natasha sounds unapologetic about it, which is fair. She did manage to save the day. “Don’t worry about the other two, by the way. I took care of them.”

“Huh.” Clint tries to nod. He can't feel Natasha, but he can, sort of, feel Bucky. Bucky's all muffled and closed off but present. Like warmth felt through several layers of clothing, or a bright, gentle light seeping in from a door just barely cracked open. Clint wants to push that door open and step inside, but the effort seems like too much. “I’m gonna nap now.”

“Oh, fuck. Clint, hey, stay awake. Clint. C’mon.”

Clint wants to listen to him, but the urge to just take a little, teeny-tiny nap overrides that instinct. Bucky’s there anyway. He's so warm. Clint’s safe.

“Just don’t die. Don’t you dare.” Bucky's voice sounds hoarse, which is weird. That’s the last thing Clint’s aware of.

-

Clint doesn’t die. 

What he does is this: he sleeps for three days, then wakes up with a migraine that won’t leave him for a week. He gets nosebleeds daily. The psychic powers wax and wane. Being in a hospital full of the sick and dying while able to pick up on strangers' thoughts isn't Clint's idea of a good time, and he's lucky he's sedated or sleeping for most of it.

Every day, at right around three, Bucky comes by to visit. One of the nurses confides in Clint that Bucky came even before Clint was awake. Technically he wasn’t supposed to, but no one had the heart or the ability to stop him.

“You don’t have to keep coming by,” Clint says, somewhere around day eight of his hospital stay. He thinks it’s day eight. He can barely count, let alone provide for good conversation. “If you’re busy -”

“I ain’t busy, and shut up, sure I do,” Bucky says. “Man, you’re a real moron sometimes, you know that?”

“What.”

“I was talkin’ to Steve,” Bucky says. “He told me some things.”

“Aw, Steve, no.”

“What kinda things, you ask?” Bucky spreads his hands out. “Things like you thinkin’ I was in love with him and all and not even bothering to ask me.”

“I didn’t ask what kind of things -”

“Yeah, you didn’t ask,” Bucky says. “That’s the point I was making. And like - look, I get it, but.” He stops and shrugs, looking away. “Just because Steve’s my best friend doesn’t mean he’s my best guy.”

There is only one excuse for what Clint says next, and it’s painkillers. That’s what he’s telling himself. “So you’re not in love with Steve?”

“Nah. Got over that years ago.” Bucky smiles crookedly at him, looking away for a moment. “Before you were born, even. Doesn’t matter. Me and him aren’t ever gonna be like that.”

“Sorry.”

Bucky shrugs. “Just because Stevie doesn’t feel like that doesn’t mean nobody else can.”

“Sure, I wasn’t saying that. That’s not what I meant.” Clint’s still tired and just about everything hurts, and he’s got all this hope trying to fill him up and is only sort of quashing it. It’s not going too well. “Just, you don’t gotta waste your time on me if there’s - if somebody else is …”

“Hey, Clint?” Bucky says, and doesn’t wait for Clint to reply. “Shut the fuck up.”

“Okay.”

“No, sh, sh.” Bucky puts his hand over Clint’s mouth. “Shut your goddamned mouth for once in your life. There’s not somebody else. I’m not in love with Steve, I’m not gonna run off with - I don’t know, Natasha or Sam or anybody. I’ll give you one fucking guess who I’ve wanted to be with for the past - what, I don’t even know how long. It’s been months. One guess. ‘Cuz that’s who I’ve been - visiting in the hospital, and that’s who I am not gonna let be a fucking idiot for another fucking second.”

“Uh.”

“Okay, all right, don’t guess. I’m just - Steve was tellin’ me, right, and don’t you _aw Steve no_ me again. And you - you get it, right? That I like you? That I wanna take you out? If you don’t want that, you say so.”

“No, what? I do, that’s - you do?” The shitty, unfiltered psychic powers have been steadily receding, but even with them near-gone Clint's pretty sure Bucky's being honest. He wants Bucky to be honest, anyway. He hopes to god this is the truth.

“Christ, you’re an idiot sometimes.” Bucky runs his hands over his face, pinching the bridge of his nose for a moment. He inhales deeply, looks to the ceiling like it might offer him some wisdom, then finally says, “Clint. When you get out of the hospital, I’m gonna take you to the best goddamn pizza place in New York.”

Clint considers this, then says, “You don’t know where you’re gonna take me, do you?”

“No, but I’ve probably got a few days, right?”

“A couple, yeah,” Clint says. “I should get out soon. Hopefully. Long as I don’t die or something.”

“You’re not gonna die.”

Another person has come to visit regularly, and that’s Maria Hill, who came to apologize to him yet again. Now that she’s apologized twice in the span of a month Clint figures she will never, ever do it again, so he’s going to treasure those moments like goddamn precious jewels. Three times she’s dropped in. On the second, she explained to him that SHIELD had been testing the drugs Hydra were producing, and that they’d anticipated the very same side effects Clint experienced. She also told him the number of volunteers they’d lost in the process. 

Clint probably isn't meant to share the numbers, but he does anyway because Bucky deserves to hear it. “Everybody else they tested this stuff on died. I’m survivor number two out of ten.”

“You’re what,” Bucky says. Half-rising, he clenches his fists in the sheets of the hospital bed, gone wide-eyed as he stares at Clint. His throat works as he swallows and there’s a flush of agitated color in his cheeks. 

Clint shrugs, and does not pretend to be doing anything but blatantly staring.

“And nobody told me this? What - so you were just gonna, I don’t know, die from fucking - god damn it.”

Clint licks his lips. Bucky’s pretty when he’s mad. Replying might be polite, though. Clint should do that. “What were you gonna do if somebody told you earlier?”

Bucky’s voice rises in both speed and volume. “Found a way to fix it! I woulda gone anywhere. I would’ve gone to fucking space if that’s what it took. Brand owes me a favor.”

Clint starts laughing, mostly at the idea of Bucky in an old-fashioned space suit. Part of him figures technology’s moved on since then, but he can’t think of space as anything other than footage of the moon landing played off a VHS in high school history class, grainy black and white figures in bulky suits waddling around on the moon. Just because it’s not what Bucky meant doesn’t mean Clint can’t enjoy the thought. “Space? What’s supposed to be in space?”

“You never know, these days.”

“Never know when you’ll go to the moon or whatever. What were you gonna find on the moon?” Clint knows how dopy his grin must look and doesn’t care. "Outer space. You wouldn't've gone to space."

“Shut the fuck up,” Bucky says.

“That’s so romantic. You woulda brought me some space rocks.” Clint clasps his hands together and bats his eyelashes as ridiculously as he can. “Just to cure my crazy Nazi drug death sentence.”

“Well, yeah,” Bucky says.

“When did you even meet Brand -”

“You’ve been in the hospital for almost a week, Barton,” Bucky says dryly. “I gotta find something to do with my time, don’t I?”

“You’re my favorite,” Clint says blearily. He’s really tired, but he doesn’t wanna go to sleep. “I mean, after Natasha and Preston and Maria and May and -”

“I get it, I get it,” Bucky says. “You don’t have to keep going. You know how to make a fella feel special, huh?”

“Look. Ladies first is all, okay? Here.” Clint reaches out with both hands. “Gimme your hand.”

Bucky does as he’s asked, and hides his confusion well in the process. Clint wraps his hands around the hand Bucky offers, then closes his eyes and rests his head back on the pillows again.

“Thanks,” Clint says. “That’s good. I’m gonna sleep. You figure out pizza.”

“I ain’t staying just to watch you sleep,” Bucky says. He hesitates, then leans over to kiss Clint’s forehead. “Just get out of the hospital okay, will you? Try not getting yourself nearly killed a little more often, why don’t you.”

“Ehh,” Clint says. Bucky’s hand is cool against hist. He runs his thumbs over the metal joints of it. Bucky’s fingers flex slightly, and Clint smiles to himself. “Job description. It’s in the - look at the … you know what I meant.”

“Okay, yeah, get your sleep.”

“Oh, hey, hey, no,” Clint says. “I mean, yes, sleep, but hey. Bro. Listen. You’re great. You’re a way better person than you should be, after, you know, Russkies, Hydra, whatever. I think you’re great. Did people say swell when you were, you know, the war?”

“You don’t have to translate to forties lingo, Clint, I get it,” Bucky says.

“Well, you’re swell, and I’m glad you’re my best guy, and - the bee’s knees.”

Bucky snorts. “I was maybe three when people said that. Maybe.”

“Fuck you.” Clint refuses to let go of Bucky’s hand, or open his eyes, or do much of anything other than lie there.

-

**(an epilogue)**

Here’s the thing: Clint may be kind of an idiot about some things, but he’s got a head for numbers. He can do math fine, and he’s good at arrows and geometry and a whole host of other things. Little details stick with him sometimes.

Like the date of his first mission with the team Maria assigned to him.

He doesn’t have to doublecheck to know that the calendar’s coming ‘round to a full year since then. It seems like a better day to call an anniversary than when he got out of the hospital - or when Bucky yelled at him in the hospital, because for all that he’s good at dates he can’t remember that whole month too well anymore - both because it’s clearer in his memory and less associated with him almost dying.

Pulling a couple strings means he gets the day off, and pulling a few more means that Bucky’s got the day off, too. As long as no Avengers business comes up, anyway. Neither of them can predict that. SHIELD’ll leave them alone, though, and that’s as close to a guarantee as Clint is going to get.

The day comes around and he texts Bucky, says, _You want to come over and watch a movie or whatever?_

Bucky’s reply is _Me and Nat are getting pancakes. Later?_

Clint smacks the heel of his palm against his forehead and calls. “Buck, c’mon. You’re gonna put pancakes before me?”

“They’re really good pancakes.” It sounds like Bucky’s still working on chewing them even as he talks. “Just incredible. You’ll still be there tomorrow and these won’t.”

Clint eyes the dinner he made, and shrugs. Leftovers. “You still want to swing by later?”

“Maybe. We’ll see. Why, what’s up?”

“Nothing,” Clint says. There are balloons. He ordered one of those fruit bouquets, because the idea was so absurd and he actually had the money. Most of the time, despite having a hell of a romantic streak, he’s pretty shit at intentional romantic gestures. He pats Lucky on the head, and Lucky wags his tail and pretends he wasn’t just trying to get up on the table to claim the fruit bouquet for dogkind.

“You okay?”

“I’m good,” Clint says. “Putting off paperwork.”

“Get your damn paperwork done,” Bucky says, laughing. “I’m gonna go; Natasha’s glaring at me. I think I’ve been ignoring her too long.”

-

Bucky shows up thirty minutes later, looking contrite as he hides his face behind some flowers. “I was gonna get you some arrows or somethin’, but Natasha said it’d take too long,” he says by way of greeting. “So I kind of forgot what day it was, and also I didn’t know we were doing anything for it, but look. Forgetting’s kind of my thing.”

“Your thing,” Clint echoes. He feels a lot better about himself, at least. He also makes a mental note to order Natasha one of those stupid fruit bouquets. The one he got is half gone, most of it in Lucky’s stomach, but it’s Bucky’s fault for not realizing Clint was going to make up a day for their anniversary anyway. “Seriously? That’s what you’re going with?”

“Shut the fuck up.” Bucky tosses the flowers aside and tugs Clint in for a kiss.

Clint’s good with that.


End file.
